c. b. macpherson-the life and times of liberal democracy-oxford university press(1977)

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Page 1: C. B. Macpherson-The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy-Oxford University Press(1977)

O P U S General Editors

Keith Thomas Humanities

J. S. Weiner Sciences

Page 2: C. B. Macpherson-The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy-Oxford University Press(1977)

C. B. M A C P H E R S O N

lh e Lite and limes ot Liberal Democracy

Bogazici University Library

IliJRlHl’Oxford New York Toronto Melbourne

O X F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Page 3: C. B. Macpherson-The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy-Oxford University Press(1977)

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp

OXFORD LONDON GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON CAPETOW N

IBADAN NAIROBI DAR ES SALAAM LUSAKA KUALA LUMPUR

SINGAPORE JAKARTA HONG KONG TOKYO DELHI BOMBAY

CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI

© C . B. Macpherson 1977 First published 1977 as paperback and

hardback simultaneously Paperback reprinted 1979

A ll rights reserved. No part o f this publication may be reproduced} stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, with­

out the prior permission o f Oxford University Press.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall nots by way o f trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form o f binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this

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!(^.Macpherson, Crawford Brough••..........anc times ofliberal democracy.

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Page 4: C. B. Macpherson-The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy-Oxford University Press(1977)

Preface

Readers m ay wonder at the shortness of this book. ‘T h e Life and Tim es5, in a title, usually signals a book ten times as long as this one. But no such length is required by my design, which is to set out in bold relief the essence o f liberal democracy as it now is conceived, and as it has been and may be conceived. For this purpose brevity is better than exhaustive detail. I hope however that m y analysis is substantial enough both to estab­lish the patterns I have found and to justify the criticism and praise from w hich I have seen no reason to abstain.

Successive preliminary versions o f this work have been pre­sented for criticism in several universities: the earliest, most tentative, version at the University o f British Colum bia, and subsequent versions, each profiting from earlier criticisms, at the Institute o f Advanced Studies o f the Australian National University, the Institute o f Philosophy of Aarhus University, and the University o f Toronto. Parts o f it have also been pre­sented and effectively criticized at several United States uni­versities and some other Canadian universities. Colleagues and students who took part in the discussions in all those countries will recognize how much I have benefited from their criti­cisms. Some w ill wish I had benefited more. But I thank them all.

University o f Toronto 4 October igy6

BOGAZICIUNiVERSITESiKUTUPHANESI

427599

,c>G.B.M.

Page 5: C. B. Macpherson-The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy-Oxford University Press(1977)
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Contents

I Models and Precursors iT H E N A T U R E OF T H E I N Q U I R Y I

T H E USE OF MO D E L S 2(i) Why models ? 2

(ii) Why historically successive models ? 6

(iii) Why these models ? 8

P R E C U R S O R S OF L I B E R A L D E M O C R A C Y 9

(i) Democracy and class 9

(ii) Pre-nineteenth-century theories as precursors 12

II Model 1: Protective Democracy 23T H E B R E A K IN T H E D E M O C R A T I C

T R A D I T I O N 23T H E U T I L I T A R I A N BAS E 25

B E N T H A M ’ S ENDS OF L E G I S L A T I O N 27

T H E P O L I T I C A L R E Q U I R E M E N T 34

JAMES M I L L ’ S S E E S A W 37 P R O T E C T I V E D E M O C R A C Y F O R

M A R K E T MAN 42

III Model 2: Developmental Democracy 44T H E E M E R G E N C E OF M O D E L 2 44

M O D E L 2 A: J. S. M I L L ’ S

D E V E L O P M E N T A L D E M O C R A C Y 50

T H E T A M I N G OF T H E D E M O C R A T I C

F R A N C H I S E 64

M O D E L 2 B: T W E N T I E T H - C E N T U R Y

D E V E L O P M E N T A L D E M O C R A C Y 69

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IV Model 3: Equilibrium Democracy 77T H E E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L M A R K E T

A N A L O G Y 77T H E A D E Q U A C Y OF M O D E L 3 82

(i) Descriptive adequacy 83

(ii) Explanatory adequacy 84

(iii) Justificatory adequacy 84

T H E F A L T E R I N G OF M O D E L 3 91

V Model 4: Participatory Democracy 93T H E RI SE OF T H E I D E A 93

IS MO R E P A R T I C I P A T I O N N O W

P O S S I B L E ? 94

(i) The problem of size 94(ii) A vicious circle and possible loopholes 98

MO D E L S OF P A R T I C I P A T O R Y

D E M O C R A C Y 108(i) Model 4A: an abstract first

approximation 108(ii) Model 4B: a second approximation 1 12

P A R T I C I P A T O R Y D E M O C R A C Y AS

L I B E R A L D E M O C R A C Y ? 1 1 4

Further Reading

Index

1 1 6

1 1 8

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Models and Precursors

I

T H E N A T U R E OF T H E I N Q U I R Y

It is not usual to embark on a ‘Life and Tim es’ until the sub­je ct’s life is over. Is liberal democracy, then, to be considered so nearly finished that one m ay presume now to sketch its life and times? The short answer, prejudging the case I shall be putting, is: ‘Y es’ , i f liberal dem ocracy is taken to mean, as it still very generally is, the dem ocracy o f a capitalist market society (no matter how modified that society appears to be by the rise o f the welfare state); but ‘N ot necessarily’ i f liberal democracy is taken to mean, as John Stuart M ill and the ethical liberal-democrats who followed him in the late nine­teenth and early twentieth centuries took it to mean, a society striving to ensure that all its members are equallyTree to realize their capabilities. Unfortunately, liberal democracy can mean either. For ‘liberal’ can mean freedom of the stronger to do down the weaker by following market rules; or it can mean equal effective freedom o f all to use and develop their capaci­ties. The latter freedom is inconsistent with the former.

The difficulty is that liberal democracy during most o f its life so far (a life which, I shall argue, began only about a hun­dred and fifty years ago even as a concept, and later as an actual institution) has tried to combine the two meanings. Its life began in capitalist m arket societies, and from the begin­ning it accepted their basic unconscious assumption, which might be paraphrased ‘M arket maketh m an’. Y et quite early on, as early as John Stuart M ill in the mid-nineteenth cen­tury, it pressed the claim o f equal individual rights to self- development, and justified itselflargely by that claim. The two

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ideas o f liberal dem ocracy have since then been held together uneasily, each with its ups and downs.

So far, the market view has prevailed: ‘liberal’ has con­sciously or unconsciously been assumed to mean ‘capitalist*. This is true even though ethical liberals, from M ill on, tried to combine m arket freedom with self-developmental freedom, and tried to subordinate the former to the latter. They failed, for reasons explored in Chapter III.

Here I am simply suggesting that a liberal position need not be taken to depend forever on an acceptance o f capitalist assumptions, although historically it has been so taken. The fact that liberal values grew up in capitalist market societies is not in itself a reason why the central ethical principle of liberalism— the freedom o f the individual to realize his or her human capacities— need always be confined to such societies. O n the contrary, it m ay be argued that the ethical principle, or, i f you prefer, the appetite for individual freedom, has out­grown its capitalist market envelope and can now live as well or better without it, just as m an’s productive powers, which grew so enormously with competitive capitalism, are not lost when capitalism abandons free competition or is replaced by some form o f socialism.

I shall suggest that the continuance o f anything that can pro­perly be called liberal dem ocracy depends on a downgrading o f the market assumptions and an upgrading o f the equal right to self-development. I think there is some prospect o f this happening. But it is far from certain that it will happen. So I have felt justified in keeping the sombre title ‘Life and Tim es’ .

M y main concern in this short work is to examine the limits and possibilities o f liberal democracy. Let me explain now w hy I have done this in terms o f models, and why I have chosen certain models as appropriate and, sufficient. This will lead into a consideration o f certain earlier models which I have relegated to the position o f precursors o f liberal democracy.

T H E USE OF MODE L S

(i) Why models ?I am using the term ‘model’ in a broad sense, to mean a

2 The Life and Times o f Liberal Democracy

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Models and Precursors 3theoretical construction intended to exhibit and explain the real relations, underlying the appearances, between or within the phenomena under study. In the natural sciences, which are mostly concerned with phenomena not variable by human will or by social change, successive models (as those o f Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein) are successively fuller and more sufficient explanations o f the real, invariant relations. In the social sciences, concerned with phenomena which, within his­torically shifting limits, are variable by human will, models (or theories, as we m ay equally well call them) may have two additional dimensions.

First, they m ay be concerned to explain not only the under­lying reality o f the prevailing or past relations between wilful and historically influenced human beings, but also the prob­ability or possibility o f future changes in those relations. By sort­ing out main lines o f change, and apparently unchanging characteristics, o f man and society up to the present, they may try to discern forces o f change, and limits o f change, which may be expected to operate in the future. Not all the theorists who have formulated laws o f change have seen them as operating in a straight line: M achiavelli, for instance, thought in terms of a cyclical movement as the historical pattern o f social and political change which could be expected to prevail indefinitely into the future. But ever since the eighteenth-century En­lightenment, with its idea o f progress, it has been more usual to think in terms o f a straight line. O f the theorists who have seen a single main line o f past change, not all have projected it far, i f at all, into the future: for instance, such eighteenth-century writers as M ontesquieu, Turgot, M illar, Ferguson, and Adam Smith, who glimpsed or formulated the law o f four stages o f society— hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial— -were apt to assume that the commercial was the final stage. But in the nineteenth century others, as different as Com te and M arx and M ill, have, with greater or less stringency, projected a main line o f past development into the future. A ny o f these kinds o f theory do o f course rely explicitly or im plicitly on models.

The second additional dimension o f models in political theorizing is an ethical one, a concern for w hat is desirable or

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good or right. The outstanding models in political science, at least from Hobbes on, have been both explanatory and justi­ficatory or advocatory. T h ey are, in different proportions, statements about what a political system or a political society is, how it does work or could work, and statements o f why it is a good thing, or why it would be a good thing to have it or to have more o f it. Some dem ocratic theorists have seen clearly enough that their theories are such a mixture. Some have not, or have even denied it. Those who start from the tacit assump­tion that whatever is, is right, are apt to deny that they are m aking any value judgem ent. Those who start from the tacit assumption that whatever is, is wrong, give great weight to their ethical case (while trying to show that it is practicable). A nd between the two extremes there is room for a considerable range of emphasis.

In any case, to show that a model o f a political system or a society, whether the existing one or one not now existing but desired, is practicable, that is, that it can be expected to work well over a fairly long run, one must make some assumptions about the human beings by whom and with whom it is going to run. W hat kind o f political behaviour are they capable of? This is obviously a crucial question. A political system that demanded, for instance, that the citizens have more rationality or more political zeal than they now demonstrably have, and more than they could be expected to have in any attainable social circum­stances , would not be worth much advocacy. The stipulation I have just emphasized is important. W e are not necessarily limited to the w ay people behave politically now. W e are not limited to that i f we can show reasons for expecting that that could change with changes in, for instance, the technological possibilities and the economic relations o f their society.

Most, though not all, political theorist? o f all persuasions— conservative traditionalist?, liberal individualists, radical re­formists, and revolutionaries— have understood very well that the workability o f any political system depends largely on how all the other institutions, social and economic, have shaped, or might shape, the people with whom and by whom the political system must operate. O n this, writers as different as Burke and M ill and M arx are in agreement, although most o f the earlier

4 The Life and Times o f Liberal Democracy

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liberal theorists, from say Locke to Bentham, paid little atten­tion to this. A nd it has generally been seen, at least in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that the most important w ay in which the whole bundle o f social institutions and social relations shapes people as political actors is in the w ay they shape people’s consciousness of themselves. For instance, when, as in the M iddle Ages and for some time after, the prevailing social arrangements have induced virtually everyone to accept an image o f the human being as human by virtue o f his accept­ing the obligations o f his rank or his ‘station in life’ , a traditional hierarchical political system w ill work. W hen a commercial and an industrial revolution have so altered things that that image is no longer accepted, a different image is required. I f it is an im age o f man as essentially a m aximizing consumer and appropriator we get a new consciousness, which permits and requires a quite different political system. If, later, in revulsion against the results o f this, people come to think of themselves in some other w ay, some other political system becomes pos­sible and even needed.

So, in looking at models o f democracy— past, present, and prospective— we should keep a sharp look-out for two things: their assumptions about the whole society in which the demo-

..cratic political system is to operate, and their assumptionsabout the essential nature o f the people who are to make the

' system work (which o f course, for a democratic system, means the people in general, not just a ruling or leading class).

T o speak, as I have just done, o f ‘ the society in which a dem ocratic political system is to operate’ m ay seem to suggest that only a political system is entitled to be called democratic, that dem ocracy is merely a mechanism for choosing and authorizing governments or in some other w ay getting laws and political decisions made. But we should bear in mind that dem ocracy more often has been, and is, thought o f as much more than that. From M ill through L. T . Hobhouse, A . D. Lindsay, W oodrow Wilson, and John Dewey, to the current proponents o f participatory democracy, it has been seen as a quality pervading the whole life and operation o f a national or smaller community, or i f you like as a kind o f society, a whole set o f reciprocal relations between the people who make up the

Models and Precursors 5

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nation or other unit. Some theorists, mostly twentieth-century ones, insist on keeping the two senses separate. Some would even exclude the second sense altogether, by defining demo- cracy as simply a system o f government. But in any realistic analysis the two senses merge into each other. For difFerent models o f democracy, in the narrow sense, are congruent with, and require, different kinds o f society.

Enough now has been said about models in general to indi­cate why an analysis o f liberal democracy m ay conveniently be cast in terms o f models. To examine models o f liberal demo­cracy is to examine what the people who want it, or want more o f it, or want some variant o f the present form of it, believe it is, and also what they believe it might be or should be. This is more than one can do by simply analysing the operations and institutions o f any existing liberal democratic states. And this

: extra knowledge is important. For people’s beliefs about a i political system are not something outside it, they are part o f it.I Those beliefs, however they are formed or determined, do ' determine the limits and possible development o f the system : they determine w hat people will put up with, and what they will demand. In short, to work in terms o f models makes it easier to keep in mind that liberal democracy (like any other political system) has two necessary ingredients that m ay not appear on the surface: (a) to be workable, it must be not far out o f line with the wants and capabilities o f the human beings who are to work i t ; hence, the model o f dem ocracy must con­tain (or take for granted) a model o f m an; and (b), since it needs general assent and support in order to be workable, the model must contain, explicitly or implicitly, an ethically justificatory theory.

(ii) Why historically successive models ?I f our object is to examine the limits and possibilities o f con­

temporary liberal democracy, why should we indulge in a ‘Life and Tim es’ ? W hy not confine ourselves to a current analysis? W ould it not be simpler to set up a single model o f present liberal democracy, by listing the observable characteristics of the practice and theory common to those twentieth-century states which everyone would agree to call liberal democracies,

6 The Life and Times o f Liberal Democracy

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that is, the systems in operation in most o f the English-speaking world and most o f Western Europe? Such a model could easily be set up. The main stipulations are fairly obvious. Govern­ments and legislatures are chosen directly or indirectly by periodic elections with universal equal franchise, the voters’ choice being normally a choice between political parties. There is a sufficient degree o f civil liberties (freedom o f speech, publication, and association, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment) to make the right to choose effective. There is formal equality before the law. There is some pro­tection for minorities. And there is general acceptance o f a principle o f m aximum individual freedom consistent with equal freedom for others.

M an y contemporary political writers do set up such a model. It can serve as a framework for investigating and dis­playing the actual, the necessary, and the possible workings o f contemporary liberal democracy. It can also be used to argue the ethical superiority o f liberal dem ocracy over other systems. W hy then should we not use a single model con­structed from present practice and present theory? W hy look at successive models that have prevailed in turn in the century or so down to our time?

T h e simplest reason is that using successive models reduces the risk o f m yopia in looking ahead. It is all too easy, in using a single model, to block o ff future paths; all too easy to fall into thinking that liberal democracy, now that we have attained it, by whatever stages, is fixed in its present mould. Indeed, the use o f a single contemporary model almost commits one to this position. For a single model o f current liberal democracy, if it is to be realistic as an explanatory model, must stipulate cer­tain present mechanisms, such as the competitive party system and wholly indirect (i.e. representative) government. But to d o ; this is to foreclose options that m ay be made possible by changed \ social and economic relations. There m ay be strong differences o f opinion about whether some conceivable future forms of dem ocracy can properly be called liberal democracy, but this is something that needs to be argued, not put out o f court by definition/O ne o f the things that needs to be considered is whether liberal dem ocracy in a large nation-state is capable o f

Models and Precursors 7

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moving to a mixture o f indirect and direct dem ocracy: that is, is capable o f m oving in the direction o f a fuller participation, which m ay require mechanisms other than the standard party system.

There is another reason for preferring successive models: their use is more Jikely to reveal the full content o f the con­temporary model, the full nature o f the present system. For the presently prevalent model is itself an amalgam, produced by partial rejection and partial absorption o f previous models. Each o f the first three models I have chosen has been for a time the prevalent model, that is, has been the one generally ac­cepted, by those who were at all favourable to democracy, as a statement o f what dem ocracy is, what it is for, and what insti­tutions it needs. And each successive model, after the first, was formulated as an attack on one or more o f the previous models. Each has been offered as a corrective to or replacement o f its predecessor: the point o f departure has always been an attack on at least some part o f a preceding model, even when, as has often been the case, the new model embodied substantial el­ements o f an earlier one, sometimes without the formulators apparently being aware o f this. Thus each o f the models is to some extent an overlay on previous ones. So we are more likely to see the full nature o f contemporary liberal democracy, and its possible future direction and limits, by looking at the suc­cessive models, and at the reasons for their creation and for their failure.

(iii) Why these models ?Even i f we are persuaded o f the merits o f model-building,

and o f the value o f analysing liberal dem ocracy by examining successive prevalent models, the question, m ay be asked, why choose, as I have chosen, to. go back no farther than the nine­teenth century? W hy not go back at least to Rousseau or Jefferson, or to the democratic ideas associated with seven­teenth-century Puritanism, as is more usually done by those who want to trace the roots o f modern liberal democracy?

This question cannot, without circular reasoning, be settled simply by definition. One could easily put forward a definition of liberal dem ocracy by which some pre-nineteenth-century

8 The Life and Times o f Liberal Democracy

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Models and Precursors 9theories and visions o f democracy would qualify for inclusion. Thus if, as seems not unreasonable, one reduced the essentials o f liberal dem ocracy to three or four stipulations— say, an ideal o f equal individual rights to self-development, equality before the law, basic civil liberties, and popular sovereignty with an equal political voice for all citizens— leaving out any stipulations about representation, party systems and so on, then some earlier ideas o f dem ocracy could be included as liberal democratic. Equally reasonably, by putting in stipula­tions about representation etc. one m ay exclude various earlier concepts. The definition o f the model depends on value judge­ments about what are the essentials, and those judgements can­not be defended merely by invoking a definition.

Are we left, then, with no basis for choosing between possible starting-points for liberal dem ocracy? I think not. For if our concern is with the possible future o f liberal democracy, we must pay attention to the relation between democratic institu­tions and the underlying structure o f society. And there is one such relation, largely neglected by current theorists o f liberal democracy, which m ay be thought to be decisive. This is the relation between dem ocracy and class,

I want now to argue that the most serious, and least exam ­ined, problems o f the present and future o f liberal democracy arise from the fact that liberal democracy has typically been designed to fit a scheme of democratic government onto a class-divided society; that this fit was not attempted, either in theory or in practice, until the nineteenth century; and that, therefore, earlier models and visions of dem ocracy should not be counted as models o f liberal democracy.

P R E C U R S O R S OF L I B E R A L D E M O C R A C Y

(i) Democracy and class As soon as attention is focused on the relation between demo­

cracy and class, the historical record falls into a new pattern. It is, o f course, not new to notice that in the main Western tradition o f political thought, from Plato and Aristotle down to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, democracy, when it was thought o f at all, was defined as rule by the poor, the

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ignorant, and incompetent, at the expense of the leisured, civilized, propertied classes. Democracy, as seen from the upper layers o f class-divided societies, meant class rule, rule by the wrong class. It was a class threat, as incompatible with a liberal as with a hierarchical society. The main Western tradi­tion down to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is to say, was undemocratic or anti-democratic.

But there were, indeed, in that whole stretch o f over 2000 years, recurrent democratic visions, democratic advocates, and even some examples o f democracy in practice (though these never embraced a whole political community). W hen we look at these democratic visions and theories we shall find that they have one thing in common, which sets them sharply apart from the liberal dem ocracy o f the nineteenth and twentieth cen­turies. This is, that they all depended on, or were made to fit, a non-class-divided society. It is hardly too much to say that for most o f them democracy was a classless or a one-class society, not merely a political mechanism to fit such a society. These earlier models and visions o f dem ocracy were reactions against the class-divided societies o f their times. As such they may properly be called utopian, an honourable name derived from the title o f Thom as M ore’s astonishing sixteenth-century work Utopia.

This puts them in striking contrast to the liberal-democratic tradition from the nineteenth century on, which accepted and' acknowledged from the beginning— and more clearly at the beginning than later— the class-divided society, and set out to fit a democratic structure onto it.

The concept o f a liberal dem ocracy became possible only when theorists— first a few and then most liberal theorists— found reasons for believing that ‘one man, one vote’ would not be dangerous to property, or to the continuance o f class- divided societies. The first systematic thinkers to find so were Bentham and James M ill, in the early nineteenth century. As we shall see (in Chapter II) they based that conclusion on a mixture o f two things: first, deduction from their model o f man (which assimilated all men to a model o f bourgeois m axim i­zing man, from which it followed that all had an interest in maintaining the sanctity o f property); and second, their

i o The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy

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Models and Precursors

observation o f the habitual deference o f the lower to the ” higher classes.

So I find the watershed between utopian dem ocracy and liberal dem ocracy to come in the early nineteenth century. T h a t is my reason for treating the pre-nineteenth-century theories as precursors o f liberal democracy, rather than treat­ing any o f them, say Rousseau or Jefferson or any o f the seventeenth-century Puritan theorists, as part of the ‘classical5 liberal democratic tradition. This is not to say that the pre- nineteenth-century concepts have been neglected or dismissed by the twentieth-century theorists. O n the contrary, the earlier concepts have not infrequently been drawn in and appealed to, particularly by twentieth-century exponents of what I am calling M odel 2. But this has not been much help to such exponents, for they have generally failed to notice that the class assumptions o f the earlier theories were incongruous with their own,

I have said that those who presented favourable models or visions of dem ocracy before the nineteenth century intended them to fit, or to be, either classless or predominantly one-class societies. Before looking at the pre-nineteenth-century record it w ill be well to state more specifically what is meant by class in this context.

Glass is understood here in terms o f property: a class is taken to consist o f those who stand in the same relations o f ownership or non-ownership o f productive land and/or capital. A some­w hat looser concept o f class, defined at its simplest in terms of rich and poor, or rich and middle and poor, has been promi­nent in political theory as far back as one likes to go, though in the earliest theories (such as Aristotle’s) the criterion o f class was only im plicitly ownership o f productive property. However, the view that class* defined at least im plicitly in terms of pro­ductive property, was an important criterion o f different forms o f government, and even an important determinant o f what forms o f government could come into existence and could work, was a view held by Aristotle, by M achiavelli, by the seventeenth-century English republicans, and by the American Federalists, long before M arx found in class conflict the motor o f history.

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Some of the non-democratic theorists who gave class a central place in their analyses (for instance, Harrington) were much concerned with distinctions between classes based not just on property or no property, but on different kinds o f property relations, such as feudal versus non-feudal. But the democratic theorists generally kept their eyes on a simpler distinction: that between societies with two classes, societies with only one class, and societies with no classes. Thus, some o f the earlier Utopians (like the present-day communists) have en­visaged a society with no individual ownership o f productive land or capital, hence no property classes: this we m ay call a classless society. Different from this is the idea o f society where there is individual ownership o f productive land and capital and where everyone owns, or is in a position to own, such property: this we m ay call a one-class society. Finally there is the society where there is individual ownership o f productive land and capital and where not everyone, but only one set of people, owns such property: this is the class-divided society.

T he distinction here made between ‘classless’ and ‘one-class’ m ay seem somewhat arbitrary: the societies, or visions o f society, I am so describing might both o f them be properly enough described by either term. But since the two societies are significantly different, two different terms are needed to describe them, and it is more in accord with modern usage to keep the term ‘classless5 for a society with no private ownership o f productive land or capital, and ‘one-class’ for a society where everyone does or m ay own such productive resources.

(ii) Pre-nineteenth-century theories as precursorsLet us now look at the record o f democratic theory before

the nineteenth century. In the ancient world there were of course some outstanding actual functioning democracies, most notably the Athens celebrated by Pericles. But no record o f any substantial theory justifying or even analysing democracy has survived from that era.1 W e m ay surmise that any such

1 Aristotle did briefly analyse various kinds o f‘democracy', under which head he included systems with, a moderate property qualification for voting. He was strongly opposed to full democracy: the only kind in which he found any merit was one in which ‘husbandmen and those of moderate fortune’ had supreme power (Politics, iv c. 6, 1292 b; cf. vi c. 4, 1318 b).

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Models and Precursors 13theory would have taken, as the required base for democracy, a citizen body made up mainly o f persons not dependent on employment by others: that, at least, would correspond pretty well to the facts, as far as we know them, about the Athenian city-state in its democratic period, which has been well de­scribed as a property-owning democracy. W e do not know if such a requirement, which amounts to the requirement of a one-class citizen body, was built into a theoretical model, since no theoretical model has come down to us: there can be no more than a reasonable supposition that it was.

In the M iddle Ages one would not expect, nor does one find, any theory o f democracy, or any demand for a democratic franchise: such popular uprisings as flared up from time to time were not concerned about an electoral franchise, for at that time power did not generally lie in elected bodies. Where feudalism prevailed, power depended on rank, whether in­herited or acquired by force o f arms. No popular movement, however enraged, would think that its aims could be achieved by its getting the vote. And in the nations and independent city-states o f the later M iddle Ages also, power was not to be sought in that way. W here voices were raised and rebellions mounted against the late medieval social order, as in the Jacquerie in Paris (135B), the uprising o f the Giompi in Florence (1378), and the Peasants’ Revolt in England (1381), the demands were for levelling o f ranks, and sometimes for levelling o f property, rather than for a democratic political structure. T h ey wanted either a classless communistic society, as indicated in the sentiment attributed to John Ball, o f Peasants’ R evolt fam e: ‘Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common, and until there w ill be neither serfs nor gentlemen, and we shall all be equal’ ,2 or a levelled society where all might have property. There is no record o f any o f these movements having produced any sys­tematic theory, nor having sketched a democratic political structure.

W hen we move on to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we do find some explicit democratic theories. Tw o democratic currents appear then in England. One o f them has a classless

2 Quoted in M. Beer: A History o f British Socialism} London, 1929, i. 28.

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base, the other a one-class base. The democratic utopias of those centuries, the best-known o f which are M ore’s Utopia (1516) and W instanley’s The Law o f Freedom (1652), were classless societies. They were envisioned as replacing class- divided societies: their authors constructed them to denounce all class systems o f power. Finding the basis o f class oppression and exploitation in the institution o f private property, they replaced it by communal property and communal work. These early modern visions o f dem ocracy were visions of a funda­m entally equal, unoppressive society, as well as prescriptions for a scheme o f government. Such a society had to be classless, and to be classless it had to be without private property.

The other seventeenth-century democratic current, in so far as it flowed in political and not simply religious channels, is no less related to class. English Puritanism, in that century, was rife with democratic ideas. Although these were generated by controversies about church government, and were actually put into effect only in that sphere (and, very briefly, in the army), they did spill over into ideas about civil government, especially in the period o f the C ivil Wars and the Commonwealth. But, except for such extreme radical Utopians as W instanley, the groups and movements whose political thinking m ay be said to have emerged from democratic Puritanism were not politi­cally democratic. They did not go so far as to demand full popular sovereignty or a fully democratic franchise.

The Presbyterians and the Independents insisted on a prop­erty qualification for the franchise. About the position o f the other main political movement, the Levellers, who were for a few years during the Civil War's very strong, there is some dispute. I have shown elsewhere3 that the Levellers, as an organized movement, speaking in concerted manifestos, in­tended to exclude all wage-earners and alms-takers (more than h alf the adult males) from the franchise. But some historians4

3 The Political Theory o f Possessive Individualism, Oxford, 1962, ch. 3; and Democratic Theory, Essays in Retrieval, Oxford, 1973, Essay 12.

4 Keith Thomas: ‘The Levellers and the Franchise’, in G, E. Aylmer (ed.): The Interregnum: the Quest fo r Settlement, 1640-1660, London, 1972; and M. A. Barg, as cited in Christopher Hill: The World Turned Upside Down, London, 1972, pp. 94, 97.

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Models and Precursors 15have argued, in reply, that the Levellers, in their individual' writings and speeches, were not unanimous about this, and that some o f them were full democrats. I f this is allowed as a possible interpretation o f the statements o f some o f the Level­lers, we have to ask what class structure was thought, by any dem ocratic Levellers, to be consistent with or required by the dem ocracy they wanted? The answer is clear. A ll the Levellers were strongly against the class differences they saw around them, which enabled a class of landlords and moneyed men to dominate and exploit the men o f small property (and even to reduce the latter to men o f no property). Some o f the most vehement Leveller tracts5 saw a class conspiracy of the men of wealth and rank, and wanted to put it down. The ideal o f all the Levellers was a society where all men had enough property to work on as independent producers, and where none had the kind or amount o f property which would enable them to be an exploitive class.

In short, the Levellers, whether or not any of them embraced full democracy, all cherished the ideal of a one-class society. The Levellers had the same historical view o f society as Rousseau was to have a century later. They found that the rot had set in with exploitive private property. The small private property o f the independent producer was a natural right. The large private property whioh enabled its owner to exploit the rest was a contradiction o f natural right.

W hen we reach the eighteenth century we find some sub­stantial theories-—not many— which are usually, and quite properly, called democratic. W e m ay take, as the leadings eighteenth-century exponents o f democracy, Rousseau and Jefferson: their democratic ideas have been more influential, more carried over into our own time, than any others of that century.6 M uch as Rousseau’s and Jefferson’s positions differed

6 e.g. those cited in The Political Theory o f Possessive Individualism, pp. 154-6.

6 James Madison has no doubt been at least as influential as Jefferson, if not more so, in American thinking: Robert Dahl for instance builds his twentieth-century model of democracy largely on Madison. And Madison appears to be an exception to my generalization, for he did, in the 1780s, recognize a class-divided society, and did try to fit a system of government to it. But he is no exception, for the system he proposed can scarcely be

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in other respects, both o f them required a society where every­one had, or could have, enough property to work on or work with, a society o f independent producers (peasants or farmers, and craftsmen), not a society divided into dependent wage- earners on the one hand, and, on the other, land and capital owners on whom they were dependent.

Rousseau’s position is clear. .Private property is a sacred individual right.7 But only the moderate property o f the small working proprietor is sacred. A n unlimited property right, Rousseau argued forcefully in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755), was the source and the continuing means of exploitation and unfreedom: only a limited right was morally justifiable. He reasserted this position in The Social Contract (1762). The first property, property in the original means of producing the means o f life, was property in a piece o f land. The original right to land, the right o f the first occupier, was limited in two w ays: ca man must occupy only the amount he needs for his subsistence; and . . . possession must be taken, not by any empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation5.8 So Rousseau found a basis in natural right for his insistence on limited property.

He needed such a limited property right for another reason, which he also made explicit: only such a limited right was consistent with the sovereignty o f the general will. A truly democratic society, a society that would be governed by the

called democratic: one need only look at his anxiety to protect ‘the minority of the opulent against the majority5 (Max Farrand (Ed.): The Records o f the Federal Convention i?8 y , revised edn., New Haven and London, 1937, i. 43 r); his provisions against the dominance of ‘faction5, which he defined as ‘a number of citizens, whether a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest’ (Federalist Papers, No. 10); and his insistence on a natural right to unequal property, which must be protected against democratic levelling propensities (ibid.). He cannot, therefore, be enlisted as a pre-nineteenth- century liberal democrat.

7 ‘. . . the right of property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizen­ship, and even more important in some respects than liberty itself. . . . property is the true foundation of civil society’ . Discourse on Political Economy (1758) in The Social Contract and Discourses (trans. G. D. H. Cole), Every­man’s Library, 1927, p. 271.

8 Bk. I, ch. 9, in ibid., p. 20.

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Models and Precursors 17general will, requires such an equality o f property that ‘no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself’ .9 The reference to buying and selling persons is apparently not a reference to slavery, for this principle is set out as a permanent rule for citizens, i.e. free m en : presumably, then, it is a prohibition o f the purchase and sale o f free wage labour. Again, ‘laws are always o f use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too m uch’,10

Rousseau’s reason for requiring such equality was clear enough. It followed directly from his insistence on the sover­eignty o f the general will. For where differences o f property divide men into classes with opposed interests, men will be guided by class interests, which are, vis-a-vis the whole society, particular interests; so they will be incapable o f expressing a general w ill for the common good. The emergence and steady operation o f the general will required a one-class society of working proprietors. Such a society was to be achieved by government action: T t is therefore one of the most important functions o f government to prevent extreme inequality of for­tunes; not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving all men o f means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor, but by securing the citizens from becoming poor.’11

W hen we turn to the theorist who is often accounted the first great Am erican proponent o f dem ocracy we find a similar, though less systematic, argument. Thomas Jefferson treated the common people as trustworthy to an extent unusual in most subsequent Presidents o f the United States. It would be unduly cynical to think that this was because he was with­out the temptations afforded by modern techniques o f presi­dential public relations. In any case, he made it clear, both in his public statements and his private letters, that his trust in the people was trust in the independent worker-proprietor,

9 Bk. II, ch. 11, in ibid., p. 45.10 Bk. I, ch. 9, in ibid., p. 22, n. 1.11 Discourse on Political Economy, in ibid., p. 267.

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whom he saw as the backbone, and hoped would remain the backbone, o f Am erican society.

In his most substantial published work, the Motes on Virginia (1791), he was clear that his favourable estimate o f human nature was confined to those who had substantial economic independence:

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition . . . generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure the degree of its corruption . . . The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.12

The same principle is expressed in a letter to John Adams in 1 81 3:

Here everyone may have land to labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age. Every­one, by his property or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the. support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which, in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private.13

Democracy, for Jefferson, required a society in which everyone was independent economically. Reasoning from the American situation, Jefferson did not require that everyone should be a worker-proprietor, but only that everyone could be one if he wished. H e had no objection to wage-labour, but only because, with free land available, wage-earners were as independent as husbandmen. N or did he object to some men, like himself, having substantial estates, provided that everyone else had, or could have, a small estate sufficient to make him independent. In the circumstances which Jefferson saw prevailing in Am eri­ca, and which he considered prerequisite for dem ocracy any-

12 Notes on Virginia, Query X IX , in Saul K . Padover: The Complete Jefferson, New York, 1943, pp. 678-9.

13 Ibid., pp. 285-6.

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Models and Precursors

where, there was, therefore, no fundamental class division. He allowed the existence o f a wage-relation only because it did

'not, in those circumstances, make a class-divided society." Jefferson’s prerequisite for a democracy was, like Rousseau’s, a

one-class society.' It m ay be objected that the kind o f society envisaged by these pre-nineteenth-century democratic writers as a pre­requisite o f dem ocracy was not after all a one-class society, in that it would still leave women as a subordinate class, unable to own productive property in their own right. Moreover, as we have seen, the point emphasized by the democratic oppo­nents o f class-divided society was that any class without pro­ductive property was dependent on and exploited by the class with such property. It m ay well be argued that women were in just that position, and certainly the early democratic writers were not conspicuous for taking any stand against it: Rousseau indeed thought that women ought to be kept dependent. Were not these writers, then, assuming what must be called a class- divided society?

I think not. For down to the nineteenth century women were commonly considered not full members o f society. They were in, but not of, civil society. It would scarcely occur to a theorist, in describing or prescribing the class character o f a society, to treat them as a class. A n eighteenth-century demo­crat could think o f a one-class society excluding women as easily as an ancient Athenian democrat could think o f a one- class society excluding slaves.

N or can women be said to have been a class in any full sense. True, in so far as women could not own property they meet our minimum definition o f a class. A nd in so far as they were kept dependent and exploited they fit the underlying concept o f class as an exploited/exploiter relation. But there is a very great difference between the w ay they were exploited and the w ay the propertyless working class (who were also considered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be not full members o f civil society14) were exploited. The difference is I. think so great as to make it inappropriate to describe women as a class.

14 Cf. The Political Theory o f Possessive Individualism, pp. 221-9.

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For from the seventeenth century on, as the capitalist market relation replaced feudal or other status relations as the means by which owners benefited from the work o f non-owners, it was understood that the only permissible arrangement for such benefit was the relation between free wage-earners and'owhers o f the capital which employed them. /The wage relation, a strictly market relation, became the criterion o f class. And in the eighteenth century, when Rousseau and Jefferson were stipulating a one-class society, and for some time after that, women were not a class by that criterion. They were indeed exploited by the male-dominated society, which made most o f them perform the function o f reproducing the labour force for no more reward than their subsistence. But they were made to do this by legal arrangements akin to a feudal (or even slave) relation, rather than by a market relation. In so far as class was, and was seen to be, determined by the capitalist market relation, women as such were not, and would not be thought to be, a class. T h at being so, writers who inveighed against class-divided society while not treating women as a class, were genuinely stipulating a one-class society. W e are therefore, I think, still entitled to refer to the pre-nineteenth- century democratic theorists as advocates o f a one-class (or classless) society.

This brief survey o f models o f dem ocracy earlier than the nineteenth century is, I hope, sufficient to sustain my general­ization that all o f them wfere fitted either to a classless or to a one-class society. And that is why I think that all o f the pre- nineteenth-century democratic theories are better treated as being outside the liberal-democratic tradition. T o be counted in that tradition a theory should surely be both democratic and liberal. But w hat is usually, and I think rightly, considered to be the liberal tradition, stretching from Locke and the Encyclopedistes down to the present, has from the beginning included an acceptance o f the m arket freedoms o f a capitalist society.

T he patternis clear enough. T h e seventeenth- and eighteenth- century liberals, who were not at all democratic (from, say, Locke to Burke) fully accepted capitalist m arket relations. So did the early nineteenth-century liberal-democrats, how

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Models and Precursors 21

strongly in the cases o f Bentham and James M ill we shall see in Chapter II. Then from about the middle o f the nineteenth century to the middle o f the twentieth, as we shall see in Chapter III, the liberal-democratic thinkers tried to combine an acceptance o f the capitalist market society with a humanist

' ethical position. This produced a model of democracy notably different from Bentham ’s, but still including acceptance o f the market society. Since the liberal component o f liberal demo­cracy has pretty constantly included acceptance o f capitalist relations and hence o f class-divided society, it seems appro­priate that the pre-nineteenth-century democratic theories, all o f which rejected the class-divided society, should be placed outside the liberal-democratic category. T hey were, so to speak, handicraft models o f democracy, and as such are best considered as precursors of liberal democracy.

I f this is thought to be still a somewhat arbitrary division, I shall not insist. The im portant thing is not the classification, but the recognition o f how deeply the market assumptions about the nature o f man and society have penetrated liberal- democratic theory.

The reader m ay wonder whether the grounds offered for this classification do not commit the author to the proposition that liberal dem ocracy must always embrace the capitalist market society with its class-di vision. I f ‘liberal’ has always meant that, or at least has always included that, should it con­tinue to be used only with that meaning? Is it not then incon­sistent to go on to inquire, as I do in Chapter V , into the prospects o f a democratic theory which downgrades or aban­dons the market assumptions, and to treat this as an inquiry into a possible future model o f liberal democracy?

I do not think any o f these questions are to be answered in the affirmative. I would argue that the reason ‘liberal’ did mean acceptance o f the capitalist market society, during the formative century o f liberal democracy, does not apply any longer. Liberalism had always meant freeing the individual from the outdated restraints of old established institutions. By

’’’the time liberalism emerged as liberal democracy this became a claim to free all individuals equally, and to free them to use and develop their human capacities fully. But so long as there

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was an economy o f scarcity, it still seemed to the liberal demo­crat that the only way to that goal was through the productivity o f free-enterprise capitalism. W hether this was in fact the only w ay as late as the early twentieth century m ay be doubted, but there is no doubt that the leading liberal democrats thought it to be so ; and as long as they did, they had to accept the linkage o f market society with liberal-democratic ends. But this linkage is.no longer necessary. It is no longer necessary, that is to say, i f w e assume that we have now reached a techno­logical level o f productivity which makes possible a good life for everybody without depending on capitalist incentives. T hat assumption m ay o f course be challenged. But if it is denied, then there seems no possibility o f any new model of democratic society, and no point in discussing such a model under any designation, liberal or otherwise. I f the assumption is granted, the previously necessary linkage is no longer neces­sary, and a new model not based on the capitalist market m ay properly be considered under the heading liberal-dem ocratic5.

In the following chapters I shall examine three successive models o f liberal democracy that may be said to have prevailed in turn from the early nineteenth century to the present, and shall go on to consider the prospects o f a fourth. The first model I call Protective Democracy: its case for the democratic system of government was that nothing less could in principle protect the governed from oppression by the government. The second is called Developmental Democracy: it brought in a new moral dimension, seeing democracy prim arily as a means of individual self-development. The third, Equilibrium Democracy, abandoned the moral claim, on the ground that experience of tlie actual operation o f democratic systems had shown that the developmental model was quite unrealistic: the equilibrium' theorists offered instead a description (and justification) of democracy as a competition between elites which produces equilibrium without much popular participation. This is the presently prevalent model. Its inadequacy is becoming increas­ingly apparent, and the possibility o f replacing it with some­thing more participatory has become a lively and serious issue. So this study goes on to consider the prospects and problems of a fourth model, Participatory Democracy.

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Model i: Protective Democracy

II

T H E B R E A K IN T H E D E M O C R A T I C T R A D I T I O N

W hatever m ay be thought o f Tennyson’s lines about freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent, it is clear that this is not the w ay we reached our present liberal democracies. It is true that in the present liberal democracies the universal franchise did generally come by stages, start­ing from a restrictive property qualification, moving at dif­ferent speeds in different countries to manhood suffrage, and finally including women suffrage. But before this expan­sion o f the franchise had begun at all, the institutions and ideology. o f liberal individualism were firmly established. The only apparent exceptions to this rule were no exceptions. Some European countries, notably France, did have manhood franchise before the liberal market society had fully established itself there. But since the assemblies elected by that franchise did not have the power to make or unmake governments, the arrangements cannot be deemed dem ocratic: the extent o f the franchise is a measure o f democratic government only in so far as the exercise o f the franchise can make and unmake govern­ments. So we m ay say that by the time the movement for a fully democratic franchise had gathered momentum anywhere, the concept o f dem ocracy which that franchise was to embody was very different from any of the earlier visions o f democracy.

Thus there is a sharp break in the path from pre-liberal to liberal democracy. A fresh start was made in the nineteenth century, from a v6ry different base. The earlier concepts of democracy, as we have seen, had rejected class division, believ­ing or hoping that it could be transcended, or even assuming

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that in some places— Rousseau’s Geneva or Jefferson’s Am erica — it had been transcended. Liberal democracy, on the con­trary, accepted class division, and built on it. The first formu- lators o f liberal dem ocracy came to its advocacy through a chain o f reasoning which started from the assumptions o f a capitalist market society and the laws o f classical political economy. These gave them a model o f man (as m aximizer of

"utilities) and a model o f society (as a collection o f individuals with conflicting interests). From those models, and one ethical principle, they deduced the need for government, the desirable functions o f government, and hence the desirable system o f choosing and authorizing governments. To see how deeply their models o f man and society got into their general theory, and hence into their model o f liberal dem ocracy as the best form of government, we shall do well to look more closely than is usually done at the theories o f the two earliest systematic exponents o f liberal democracy, Jerem y Bentham and James M ill.1

W e m ay start with Bentham, the original systematizer o f the theory that came to be known as Utilitarianism, and bring in James M ill when, as sometimes happened, he stated the U tilitarian case more clearly than Bentham, or when his reser­vations and ambiguities were different from Bentham ’s. James M ill was a thorough disciple o f Bentham, and a much more disciplined writer, so he often put the Benthamite case more strikingly than the master himself. A nd by the time Bentham

1 James M ill’s model can be dated precisely at 1820, in his famous article on Government. Bentham’s may be dated 1820 (see p. 35, n. 22) or 1818, when he produced the twenty-six Resolutions on Parliamentary Reform, which would admit to the franchise ‘all such persons as, being of the male sex, of mature age, and of sound mind, shall . . . have been resident either as householders or inmates, within the district or place in which they are called upon to vote*. (Works, ed. Bowring, Edinburgh and London, 1843, x. 497.)

Others, indeed, had advocated equal manhood suffrage somewhat earlier, notably Major John Cartwright, as early as 1776, in his Take Your Choice /, and Cobbett in his Political Register. But neither of them can be said to have set up a fully reasoned model, and such theoretical grounds as they did offer were backward-looking: their appeal was to the natural rights of freeborn Englishmen (before the restrictions of the franchise by 8 Henry V I, c. 7); and there was no awareness of the changed class structure or of the significance of the new industrial working class.

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Model 1: Protective Democracy 25put his mind to the question o f the best form of government, their minds ran in parallel, and they were in close touch with each other. So it will do no injustice to either to treat them almost as a unit.

It must be said that with Bentham and James M ill liberal dem ocracy got o ff to a poor start. It is not that they were in­competent theorists. O n the contrary, Bentham became de­servedly famous as a thinker, and the most influential doctrine o f the English nineteenth century was named after him. And

j James M ill, though not o f the very first rank, was a clear and forceful writer. And the general theory o f Utilitarianism, from which they both deduced the need for a democratic franchise, seemed both fundam entally egalitarian and thoroughly busi­nesslike. It was both, and that was the trouble. I shall suggest that it was the combination of an ethical principle o f equality

} with a competitive market model o f man and society that logically required both thinkers to conclude in favour o f a

| democratic franchise, but made them do so either ambiguously or with reservations.

T H E U T I L I T A R I A N BASE

The general theory was clear enough. The only rationally defensible criterion o f social good was the greatest happiness of the greatest number, happiness being defined as the amount of

j individual pleasure minus pain. In calculating the aggregate ! net happiness o f a whole society, each individual was to count

as one. W hat could be more egalitarian than that as a funda­mental ethical principle?

i But to it were added certain factual postulates. Every indivi-j dual by his very nature seeks to maximize his own pleasure | without limit. A nd although Bentham set out a long list o f j kinds o f pleasure, including many non-material ones, he was

clear that the possession o f material goods was so basic to the ) attainment o f all other satisfactions that it alone could be taken ! as the measure of them all. ‘ Each portion o f wealth has aj corresponding portion o f happiness.’ 2 And again: ‘M oney isI] 2 Principles o f the Civil Code, Part I, ch. 6, in Bentham: The Theory o fi Legislation, ed. C. K. Ogden, London, 1931, p. 103. (I have preferred this1

& B o q a z ic i U m v e r s it e s i K u t u p h a n e s t < § >

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26 The Life and Times o f Liberal Democracy

the instrument o f measuring' the quantity o f pain or pleasure. Those who are not satisfied with the accuracy o f this instru­ment must find out some other that shall be more accurate, or bid adieu to politics and morals.’ 3

So each seeks to maximize Ms own wealth withoutTimit. O ne way o f doing this is to get power over others. ‘Between wealth and power, the connexion is most close and intim ate; so inti­mate, indeed, that the disentanglement o f them, even in the imagination, is a matter o f no small difficulty. T h ey are each of them respectively an instrument o f production with relation to the other,’ 4 And again, ‘human beings are the most powerful instruments o f production, and therefore everyone becomes anxious to employ the services o f his fellows in m ultiplying his own comforts. Hence the intense and universal thirst for power; the equally prevalent hatred o f subjection.’ 5

James M ill was even more forthright. In his 1820 article Government, he wrote:

That one human being will desire to render the person and prop­erty of another subservient to his pleasures, notwithstanding the pain or loss of pleasure which it may occasion to that other indivi­dual, is the foundation of government. The desire of the object implies the desire of the power necessary to accomplish the object. The desire, therefore, of that power which is necessary to render the persons and properties of human beings subservient to our pleasures is a grand governing law of human nature . . . The grand instru­ment for attaining what a man likes is the actions of other men. Power . . . therefore, means security for the conformity between the will of one man and the acts of other men. This, we presume, is not a proposition which will be disputed.6

W ith this grand governing law o f human nature, society j s a collection of individuals incessantly seeking power over and at the expense o f each other. T o keep such a society from flying apart, a structure o f law both civil and criminal was seen to be

edition to the version printed in the Bentham Works edited by Bowring, vol. i.) On the abstraction from reality required to assert this proposition, see below, p. 30, at n. 12.

3 W. Stark (ed.) : Jeremy Benthani’s Economic Writings, i. 117.4 Constitutional Code, Bk. 1, ch. 9, in Works, ed. Bowring, ix. 48.5 Stark (ed.): iii. 430.e Section IV (p. 17 of the Barker edition, Cambridge, 1937).

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needed. Various structures o fla w might be capable o f provid­ing the necessary order, but, o f course, according to the U tilitarian ethical principle, the best set o f laws, the best dis­tribution o f rights and obligations, was that which would pro­duce the greatest happiness o f the greatest number. This most general end o f the laws could, Bentham said, be divided into four subordinate ends: ‘ to provide subsistence; to produce abundance; to favour equality; to m aintain security.57

b e n t h a m ’ s ENDS OF L E G I S L A T I O N

Bentham ’s arguments as to how each of these ends could be achieved (and how not) are revealing. Together they amount to a case for a system o f unlimited private property and capitalist enterprise, and this apparently deduced from the factual postulates about human nature and a few others. Let us look in turn at his arguments under each head.

Jurst, subsistence. The law need do nothing to ensure that enough w ill be produced to provide subsistence for everyone.

What can the law do for subsistence? Nothing directly. All it can do is to create motives, that is, punishments or rewards, by the force of which men may be led to provide subsistence for themselves. But nature herself has created these motives, and has given them a sufficient energy. Before the idea of laws existed, needs and enjoyments had done in that respect all that the best concerted laws could do. Need, armed with pains of all kinds, even death itself, commanded labour, excited courage, inspired foresight, developed all the facul­ties of man. Enjoyment, the inseparable companion of every need satisfied, formed an inexhaustible fund of rewards for those who surmounted obstacles and fulfilled the end of nature. The force of the physical sanction being sufficient, the employment of the politi­cal sanction would be superfluous.8

W hat the laws can do is to ‘provide for subsistence indirectly, by protecting men while they labour, and by making them sure o f the fruits o f their labour. Security for the labourer, security for the fruits o f labour; such is the benefit o f laws; and it is an inestimable benefit.’9

7 Principles o f the Civil Code, Part I, ch. 2; Ogden (ed.): op. cit., p. 96.8 Ibid., Part I, ch. 4; Ogden, p. 100.9 Ibid.

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The curious point here is that Bentham, in invoking fear of starvation as a natural incentive to the productive labour which would provide subsistence for everybody, has slipped from thinking o f a primitive society (‘before the idea o f laws existed5), where fear o f starvation would have that effect on everybody, to an advanced nineteenth-century industrial society, where that does not apply without an additional pro­viso. In a primitive society with such a low level o f productive technique that the incessant labour of all was needed (and was seen by all to be needed) to avoid general starvation, the fear o f starvation would be a sufficient incentive to the productive labour that would produce subsistence for all. But in a society whose productive techniques are sufficient to provide subsist­ence for everyone without such incessant labour by everyone, like England in Bentham5s time, fear o f starvation is not in itself a sufficient incentive. In such a society, fear o f starvation will be an incentive to incessant labour only where the institu­tions of property have created a class who have no property in land or working capital, and no claims on society for their support, and hence must sell their labour or starve. -

So keen a thinker as Bentham could scarcely have failed to see this, had he not been taking for granted the existence of such a class as inevitable in any economically advanced society. And we know the he did assume this: Tn the highest state of social prosperity, the great mass o f citizens w ill have no re­source except their daily industry; and consequently will be always near indigence,’10 Already we can see the teachings o f classical political economy subverting the egalitarian principle,

A similar shift takes place in his argument about ‘abun­dance5. Here he seems to slip from thinking of a society of independent producers to thinking o f his own advanced society, applying to the latter a generalization about incentives appar­ently drawn from the former. No legislation, he says, is needed to encourage individuals to produce abundance o f material goods. N atural incentives are enough, because everyone's desire is infinite. Each want satisfied produces a new want. So there is a strong and permanent incentive to produce more.

10 Ibid., Part I, ch. 14; Ogden, p. 127.

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Model 1: Protective Democracy 29

Bentham does not notice that this incentive, which m ay prop­erly enough be postulated o f the capitalist entrepreneur and possibly o f the self-employed independent producer, cannot very well apply to the wage-earners, who are ‘always near indigence5. He does not see this, because he has created his model o f man in the im age o f the entrepreneur or the independent producer. He could do that because he had no historical sense.

It is only when we come to his argument under the heads of equality and security that we can see the full extent to which his acceptance o f capitalism undermined his egalitarian ethical principle. The case for 'equality5, that is, for everyone having the same amount o f wealth or income, is set out clearly. It rests on what came to be known as the law of diminishing utility, which point's out that successive increments o f wealth (or of any m aterial goods) bring successively less satisfaction to their holder, or, that avperson with ten or a hundred times the wealth o f another has much less than ten or a hundred times as much pleasure. Given that all individuals have the same capacity for pleasure, and that ‘each portion o f wealth has a corresponding portion o f happiness5, it follows that ‘he who has the most w ealth has the most happiness5, but also that ‘ the excess in happiness o f the richer w ill not be so great as the excess o f his w ealth5.11 From this it follows that aggregate happiness will be greater the more nearly the distribution o f wealth approaches equality: m aximum aggregate happiness requires that all individuals have equal wealth.

This case for equality requires, as we have noticed, an assumption o f equal capacities for pleasure. For if some were assumed to have a greater capacity for pleasure, i.e. a greater sensitivity or sensibility, it could be argued that aggregate happiness w ould be maximized by their having more wealth than the others. Bentham was not very consistent about this. H e prefaced the ‘diminishing returns5 argument for equality by setting aside ‘the particular sensibility o f individuals, and . . . the exterior circumstances in which they m ay be placed5. These must be set aside, he said, because ‘they are never the same for two individuals5, so that, without setting those differ­ences aside, ‘it will be impossible to announce any general

11 Ibid., Part I, ch. 6; Ogden, p. 103.

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proposition’ .12 Y e t elsewhere he pointed out that, besides par­ticular individual differences in sensibility, there were differ-? ences between whole categories o f individuals. There was a difference in sensibility as between the sexes: T n point o f quantity, the sensibility o f the female sex appears in general to be greater than that o f the m ale.’13 And, o f more direct importance in an argument that depends on a relation be­tween pleasure and wealth, Bentham saw a difference in sensibility between those of different ‘station, or rank in life’ : ‘ Caeteris paribus, the quantum o f sensibility appears to be greater in the higher ranks o f men than in the lower.’14 I f Bentham had acknowledged such a property-class differential when making his case for equality o f wealth, his case would have been destroyed: he would have been endorsing the position of Edmund Burke. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he saw no need to mention that differential when stating his case for equality because he had already decided that the claims o f equality were entirely subordinate to the claims o f security.

In any case, having said this much under the head o f ‘equality’ , Bentham turned to ‘security’ , that is, security o f property and o f expectation o f return from the use o f one’s labour and property. W ithout security o f property in the fruits o f one’s labour, Bentham says, civilization is impossible. No one would form auy plan o f life or undertake any labour the product o f which he could not imm ediately take and use. N ot even simple cultivation o f the land would be undertaken i f one could not be sure that the harvest would be one’s own. The laws, therefore, must secure individual property. And since men differ in ability and energy, some w ill get more property than others. A ny attempt by the law to reduce them to equality would destroy the incentive to productivity. Hence, as between equality and security, the law must have no hesita­tion: ‘ Equality must yield.’15

The argument is persuasive, though invalid. True, i f one

12 Ibid.13 Introduction to the Principles o f Morals and Legislation, ch. 6, in Collected

Works, London, 1970, p. 64.Ibid., p. 65.

15 Principles o f the Civil Code, Part I, ch. 11; Ogden, p. 120.

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accepts Bentham ’s premiss that every individual by his very nature seeks to maximize his pleasure, and hence his material goods, without limit, and at the expense o f others, it does follow that security for the fruits o f one’s labour is needed to convert the search for gain into an incentive to produce. But it does not follow, as Bentham argued,, that no society above savagery is possible, without that security, .unless security for the fruits o f one’s labour is stretched to include the security of subsistence enjoyed by the slaves in ancient high civilizations. Forced labour, whether in the form o f slavery or in any other form, is quite capable o f sustaining a high level o f civilization; and on Bentham ’s own premiss that everyone seeks power over others because ‘human beings are the most powerful instru­ments o f production’, he could scarcely rule this out as un­natural. In fact, as we shall see in a moment, rather than ruling it out he endorses it.

However, i f he had been content to limit his case for security o f property to the case for security for the fruits o f one’s labour, he would have had a fairly effective case. But he was not con­tent with that. He made another o f his unconscious shifts. He went on to a very different proposition: that security o f any existing kind o f established property, including that which could not possibly be the fruits o f one’s own labour, must be guaranteed.

In consulting the grand principle of security what ought the legislator to decree respecting the mass of property already existing?

He ought to maintain the distribution as it is actually established. , . . . There is nothing more different than the state of property in America, in England, in Hungary, and in Russia. Generally, in the first of these countries, the cultivator is a proprietor; in the second, a tenant; in the third, attached to the glebe; in the fourth, a slave. However, the supreme principle of security commands the preser­vation of all these distributions, though their nature is so different, and though they do not produce the same sum of happiness.16

Bentham ’s supporting argument demonstrates again his lack o f historical sense. His contention is, that to overturn any exist­ing system o f property is to make impossible any other system

16 Ibid., Part I, ch. 11 ; Ogden, p. 1 19.

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of property. It does not need a profound knowledge o f history to see that this is not so. For instance, the destruction o f the feudal system o f property led to the establishment o f an equally firm capitalist system of property; and the same might be said o f many previous overthrows o f an existing system.

I f Bentham ’s unhistorical postulate had been true, he would have been logically entitled to .conclude that every established system must be maintained, even where it did not ‘produce the same sum of happiness’ ; for the overturning o f any system would then be worse, by the greatest happiness criterion, than any possible benefit from another system. But the postulate is not valid. So -his ‘demonstration’ that security has absolute priority over equality is not valid.

It might be thought that Bentham could have established his case o f the security of any established system of property, including those which maintained an extremely unequal distribution of wealth, without relying on his unhistorical pos­tulate but simply by invoking another principle which he an­nounced in the chapter on equality. This is the principle that

men in general appear to be more sensitive to pain than to pleasure, even when the cause is equal. To such a degree, indeed, does this extend, that a loss which diminishes a man’s fortune by one-fourth, will take away more happiness than he could gain by doubling his property.17

But Bentham saw that this alone did not justify the mainten­ance of great inequality. A ll he concluded from this was that, as between two persons o f equal wealth, a redistribution would mean a net loss o f happiness. Fie could have shown further, that as between two persons one o f whom started with four times the wealth o f another, a redistribution o f a quarter o f A ’s wealth to B, which would double B’s wealth, would still mean some net loss o f happiness. But if A started with say,'tw elve, times the wealth o f B, a redistribution of a quarter o f A ’s wealth would quadruple B’s wealth, which presumably would mean a net gain in happiness. Bentham recognized this. His w ay o f putting it was to say that in such a case ‘the evil done by an attack on security w ill be compensated in part by a good which

17 Ibid., Part I, ch. 6; Ogden, p. io8.

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will be great in proportion to the progress towards equality’ .18 So he needed an independent argument to make his case for the absolute priority o f security over equality. And the inde­pendent argument was, as we have seen, based on the invalid historical postulate.

From Bentham-s whole treatment o f the four subordinate ends o f legislation, and from his preceding factual postulates, it is clear, then, how deeply his general theory was penetrated by bourgeois assumptions. First we have the general postulates: that every person always acts to secure his own interest, to m aximize his own pleasure or utility, without lim it; and that this conflicts with everyone else’s interest. Then the search for the maximum pleasure is reduced to the search for maximum material goods and/or power over others. Then, postulates drawn from his contemporary capitalist society are presented as universally v a lid : that the great mass o f men will never rise above a bare subsistence level; that for them fear o f starvation rather than hope o f gain is the operative incentive to labour; that, for the more fortunate, hope o f gain is a sufficient incen­tive to m aximum productivity; that, for this hope to operate as an incentive, there must be absolute security o f property. Fin­ally, we have security o f property elevated to a ‘supreme principle’ absolutely overriding the principle o f equality.

The ultimate reason Bentham saw no contradiction here, me reason underlying his unhistorical postulate, is, I suggest, that he was really concerned only with the rationale o f the capitalist market society. In that society indeed, at least accord­ing to his version o f classical political economy, there appeared to be no such contradiction: security o f unlimited individual appropriation was the very thing which, along with unlimited desire, would induce the m aximum productivity o f the whole system. But to say that security o f property, while perpetuating inequality, maximizes productivity, is not to say that it m axi­mizes aggregate pleasure or utility. Bentham has again shifted his ground, now from aggregate utility to aggregate wealth. But these are different. The shift is illegitim ate because, by his own principle o f diminishing utility, a smaller national wealth, equally distributed, could yield a larger aggregate utility than

is Ibid.

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a larger national wealth unequally distributed. But Bentham was so imbued with the ethos o f capitalism, which is for m axi­m ization o f w ealth and sees it as equivalent to m axim ization o f utility, that he did not adm it their difference.

T H E P O L I T I C A L R E Q U I R E M E N T

For this kind of society, what kind o f state was needed? The political problem was to find a system of choosing arid author­izing governments, that is, sets oflaw-makers and law-enforcers, who would make and enforce the kind o f laws needed by such a society. It was a double problem : the political system should both produce governments which would establish and nurture a free market society and protect the citizens from rapacious governments (for by the grand governing principle o f human nature every government would be rapacious unless it were made in its own interest not to be so, or impossible for it to be so).

The crucial point in the solution o f this double problem turned out to be the extent o f the franchise, along with certain devices such as the secret ballot, frequent elections, and free- dom o f the press, which would make the vote a free and effective expression of the voter’s wishes. The extent and genu­ineness o f the franchise became the central question because, by the early nineteenth century in England, theorists were able to take for granted the rest o f the framework o f representative governm ent: the constitutional provisions whereby legislatures and executives were periodically chosen, and therefore periodically replaceable, by the voters at general elections, and w hereby the civil service (and the military) were subordinate to a government thus responsible to the electorate. So the model which the nineteenth-century thinkers started from w a s ' a system o f representative and responsible government o f this, kind. The question that was left for them was, what provisions for the extent and genuineness o f the franchise would both produce governments which would promote a free market society and protect the citizens from the government.

I f only the first o f these requirements had been seen as a problem, something far short o f a democratic franchise would

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have been sufficient. Indeed, something far short of that satis­fied Bentham for two decades after he began to think about political systems. In a work written between 1791 and 1802 he was for a limited franchise, excluding the poor, the unedu­cated, the dependent, and women,19 In 1809 he was'advocat­ing a householder franchise, one limited to those paying direct taxes on property.20 By 1817 he was talking about a ‘virtually universal’ franchise, excluding only those under age and those unable to read, and possibly excluding women (to give a decided opinion on that ‘would be altogether premature in this place’ ) ; but in that same work he said that while he had become convinced o f the safeness o f the principle o f universal suffrage, he was also convinced ‘o f the ease and consistency with which, for the sake o f union and concord, many exclusions might be made, at any rate for a time and for the sake o f quiet and gradual experience.’ 21 By 1820 he was for manhood fran­chise; but even then he said that he would gladly support the more lim ited householder franchise except that he could not see'that this could .satisfy those excluded, who ‘would perhaps constitute a m ajority o f male adults’ .22 So Bentham was not enthusiastic about a dem ocratic franchise: he was pushed to it, partly by his appraisal o f what the people by then would demand, and partly by the sheer requirements o f logic as soon as he turned his mind to the constitutional question.

‘Every body o f men [including whatever body has the power to legislate and to govern] is governed altogether by its con­ception o f what is its interest, in the narrowest and most selfish

-" sense o f the word interest: never by any regard for the interest .o f others.’ 23 The only w ay to prevent the government despoit- fing all the rest o f the people is to make the governors frequently ? removable by the m ajority o f all the people. The powers of government in the hands o f any set o f people other than those chosen and removable by the votes o f the greatest number

19 Principles o f Legislation, ch. 13, sect. 9; in Ogden (ed.): The Theory o f Legislation, p. 81.

20 Plan o f Parliamentary Reform, 1818 edn., pp. 40 n. and 127.21 Ibid., pp. 35-7 and 41 n.22 Radicalism N ot Dangerous, in Works, ed. Bowring, iii. 599.23 Constitutional Code, in Works, ed. Bowring, ix. 10a.

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‘would be necessarily directed to the giving every possible increase to their own happiness, whatever became o f the happi­ness o f others. And in proportion as their happiness received increase would the aggregate happiness o f all the governed be diminished.’ 24 Happiness is a zero-sum gam e: the more the governors have, the less the governed have.

The case for a democratic system is purely the protective case: ‘with the single exception o f an aptly organized demo­cracy, the ruling and influential few are enemies o f the subject m an y: . . . and by the very nature o f man . . . perpetual and unchangeable enemies.’ 25

A democracy, then, has for its characteristic object and effect, the securing its members against oppression and depredation at the hands of those functionaries which it employs for its defence . . .

Every other species of government has necessarily, for its charac­teristic and primary object and effect, the keeping the people or non-functionaries in a perfectly defenceless state, against the func­tionaries their rulers; who being, in respect of their power and the use they are disposed and enabled to make of it, the natural ad­versaries of the people, have for their object the giving facility, cer­tainty, unbounded extent and impunity, to the depredation and oppression exercised on the governed by their governors,26

But while logical deduction from the nature o f human beings gave an irrefutable case for a democratic constitution, Bentham was ready to compromise it on grounds o f expediency. His final position on female suffrage is a clear example. The case for universal franchise required that women, equally with men, should have the vote. Indeed, Bentham argued that, to com­pensate for their natural handicaps, women were if anything' entitled to more votes than men. Nevertheless, he held that there is now such a general presupposition against female suffrage that he could not recommend i t : ‘ the contest and con­fusion produced by the proposal o f this improvement would entirely engross the public mind, and throw improvement, in all other shapes, to a distance.’ 27

24 Ibid., p. 95.25 Ibid., p. 143.26 Ibid., p. 47.27 Ibid., p. 109.

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So we have Bentham ’s whole position on the democratic franchise. He would be happy with a limited franchise but was willing to concede manhood franchise. In principle he even made a case for universal franchise, but held that the time was not ripe for it: to advocate votes for women now would en­danger the chances o f any parliam entary reform. And we should notice that he moved to the principle o f the democratic franchise only when he had become persuaded that the poor would not use their votes to level or destroy property. The poor, he argued, have more to gain by maintaining the institu­tion o f property than by destroying it, and as evidence he pointed to the fact that in the United States those ‘without property sufficient for their m aintenance5 had, for upwards of

' fifty years, ‘had the property o f the w ealthy within the compass o f their legal power’ and had never infringed property.28

JAMES M I L L ’ S S E E S A W

It was James M ill who, in 1820, made the most powerful case for universal franchise, and even that was so guarded and put in such hypothetical terms that it can be read, and often has been read, as a case for a much less than universal franchise.29 But though he hedged his conclusions, his argument Jeads irresistibly to universal franchise. The4, main argument is bolder than Bentham ’s but essentially similar. It starts with the assertion o f what is surely the most extreme postulate about self-interest ever made, before or since— that grand governing law o f human nature that we have already seen. From this it followed that those who had no political power would be oppressed by those who did have it. The vote was political power, or at least the lack of the vote was lack o f political

| power. Therefore everyone needed the vote, for self-protection, | Nothing short o f ‘one person, one vote’ could in principle/ protect all the citizens from the government.

28 Ibid., p. 143.29 The various readings are discussed by Joseph Hamburger: ‘James

M ill on Universal Suffrage and the Middle Class’, Journal o f Politics (1962), vol. 24, pp. 167-90; and in Hamburger: Intellectuals in Politics, John Stuart M ill and the Philosophic Radicals, New Haven and London, 1965, pp. 48-53.

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But it cannot be said that James M ill was enthusiastic about democracy, any more than was Bentham. For in the same article on Government in which he made the case for a universal franchise, James M ill used considerable ingenuity in enquiring whether any narrower franchise could give the same security to every citizen’s interest as would universal franchise, and he argued that it would be safe to exclude all women, all men under the age o f 40, and the poorest one-third o f the males over 40.

The argument is almost unbelievably crude. His general principle was that ‘all those individuals whose interests are indisputably included in those o f other individuals m ay be struck off without inconvenience’ .30 T h at seems fair enough, but his applications o f the principle were brusque and over­bearing. In the first place, M ill held, this took care o f women, ‘the interest o f almost all o f whom is involved either in that of their fathers or in that o f their husbands’ .31 It also permitted the exclusion of all males under some assigned age, about which age ‘considerable latitude m ay be taken without incon­venience. Suppose the age o f forty were prescribed . ♦. scarcely any laws could be made for the benefit o f all the men o f forty which would not be laws for the benefit o f all the rest o f the com m unity.5 A nd ‘the great m ajority o f old men have sons, whose interest they regard as part o f their own. This is a law o f human nature. There is, therefore, no great danger that, in such an arrangement as this, the interests o f the young would be greatly sacrificed to those o f the old,’ 32 (M ill was 47 in 1820.)

W hen it came to the question o f an allowable property or income qualification, M ill did not even try to apply his princi­ple o f included interests. T h e question M ill posed was whether, somewhere between a qualification so low as to be o f no use and one so high as to constitute an undesirable aristocracy o f wealth, there is one ‘which would remove the right o f Suffrage from the people o f small, or o f no property, and yet constitute an elective body, the interest o f which would be identical with

30 An Essay on Government, ed.. E. Barker, Cambridge, 1937, p. 45.31 Ibid., p. 45.32 Ibid., pp. 46-7.

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that o f the com m unity?’ 83 Although this is posed as a question o f identity o f interests, the answer is in terms o f a calculation of opposed interests. M ill’s answer is that a property qualification high enough to exclude up to one-third of the people (presum­ably one-third o f the males over 40) would be safe, because each o f the top two-thirds, who would have the vote, and who would o f course have an interest in oppressing the excluded one-third, ‘would have only one-half the benefit o f oppressing a single man. In that case, the benefits o f good Government, accruing to all, might be expected to overbalance to the several members o f such an elective body the benefits o f misrule peculiar to themselves. Good Government would, therefore, have a tolerable security.’ 34 By the same token, a property qualification which excluded more than half o f the people was undesirable, for it would mean that each voter ‘would have a benefit equal to that derived from the oppression of more than one m an’ :35 this benefit would be irresistible, so that bad government would be ensured.

W e can scarcely avoid asking why James M ill, after making his strong positive case for universal suffrage, should have raised the question o f exclusions at all, let alone piling up allowable exclusions to such an extraordinary height as he did: o f the adult population, some ten-twelfths were exclud­able (one-half by sex; at least h alf the rest by age; o f the remaining quarter, one-third by property). T o say the least, this does give grounds for considering M ill less than a whole­hearted democrat. W hy did he do it, and especially why did he adm it a property qualification? And why, having done this, did he conclude his argument by reverting to his case for universal franchise, and say that it would not be dangerous because the vast majority o f the lower class would always be guided by the middle class?

M ill’s allowing such exclusions m ay be due to the fact that he, like Bentham, was prim arily interested in an electoral re­form which would undermine the dominant sinister interest of the narrow landed and moneyed class which was in full control

83 Ibid., p. 49.34 Ibid., p. 50.35 Ibid., p. 50.

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before the 1832 Reform Bill. A bout this he was much more of an activist than Bentham : he was not above trying, with some success, to frighten the oligarchy into granting the 1832 Reform (which was far short o f manhood suffrage), by holding out the likelihood o f a popular revolution i f such reform were not granted, though it is doubtful i f he himself believed in the likelihood of such revolutionary action.36 But he was very much aware o f the importance o f getting both working-class and middle-class support for such reform : he was convinced of the importance o f public opinion, including the opinion of both those classes. In pressing for reform, therefore, he must avoid offending either class.

Now M ill would not offend either class by permitting the exclusion of w om en: as Bentham at least believed, probably quite correctly, public opinion was far from ready to admit women to the franchise. The notion of excluding all men under the age o f 40 was so palpably absurd that it would not offend anybody. One m ight indeed argue that such an exclusion would reduce the number o f working-class voters more than in proportion to the well-to-do, in view o f the smaller proportion o f the poor who reached the age o f 40, but this point does not seem to have been taken up by M ill’s critics: M acaulay, much his most exhaustive critic, did draw attention to the incompetence o f M ill’s case for excluding wom en,37 but made no reference to the case for excluding the under-forties: presumably he thought it be­neath notice.

The only difficult decision for M ill was what to say about a property qualification. T o advocate full manhood suffrage with no property qualification would frighten much middle- class opinion; to advocate a property qualification which would exclude a substantial part o f the working class would be to lose their support. So M ill found himself in a position which is, oddly enough, parallel to that which he attributed to the

36 Cf. J oseph Hamburger: James M ill and the Art o f Revolution, New Haven > 1963, especially ch. 3,

37 Macaulay: ‘M ill’s Essay on Government’, Edinburgh Review, March 2829, reprinted in The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches o f Lord Macaulay, London, Longmans, Green, 1889 (Popular Edition), p. 174.

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Model 1: Protective Democracy 41

spokesmen o f what he called the opposition party o f the ruling class, and he took the same w ay out.

In an article in the first number of the radical Westminster Review (January 1824) on ‘Periodical Literature’ , M ill launched an abrasive attack on the Edinburgh Review, which he said spoke for the anti-M inisterial wing o f the ruling class. The dilemma o f that party, he said, was that, in order to discredit the M inistry so as to get themselves in, they needed to enlist non-ruling-class opinion, since that opinion did operate upon the ruling class ‘partly by contagion, partly by conviction, partly by intim idation’ ; yet they could not take a position against the present privileges o f the ruling class, support from as m any as possible o f whom they prim arily needed to get

- themselves in, and o f which they were of course themselves a part, ‘In their speeches and writings, therefore, we commonly find them playing at seesaw* N ow they recommend the interests o f the ruling class, now the interests o f the people. ‘H aving written a few pages on one side, they must write as m any on the other. It matters not how m uch the one set o f principles are really at variance with the other, provided the discordance is not very visible, or not likely to be clearly seen by the party on whom it is wished that the delusion should pass/38

M ill’s seesaw in the article Government is quite parallel: the discordance between his two sets o f principles, the one requir­ing universal franchise, the other permitting enormous exclu­sions, is kept ‘not very visible’ by his recommending a restricted franchise only hypothetically. He later denied that he was advocating the exclusion o f women, any more than that o f men under the age o f forty; his son reports him as having said that he was only asking what was the utmost allowable limit o f restriction assuming that the franchise was to be restricted;39 but the wording o f the article suggests not that he regarded the restrictions as unfortunately necessary concessions to political realism, but rather that he regarded them as useful in securing that the electors would make a good choice.40

38 Westminster Review, i. a 18.39 J. S. M ill: Autobiographys ed. Laski, Oxford World’s Classics, 1924, pp.

87-8.40 e.g. his statement that ‘a very low [property] qualification is of no

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The seesaw in the article Government is completed by M ill’s assurance to his readers, at the very end o f the article, that no danger was to be anticipated from any enfranchisement o f the lower class because the great m ajority o f that class would always be guided by the middle class. Such reassurance to his middle-class readers M ill m ight have thought advisable, since even the exclusion o f the poorest one-third o f the males m ight be calculated to leave the working class in the majority.

Ten years after the article Government, and six years after his analysis o f the seesaw, he felt able to make his position some­what clearer. In an article devoted to advocating the secret ballot, he w rote: 'O u r opinion, therefore, is that the business of government is properly the business of the rich, and that they will always obtain it, either by bad means, or good. U pon this every thing depends. I f they obtain it by bad means, the government is bad. I f they obtain it by good means, the government is sure to be good. The only good means o f obtain­ing it are, the free suffrage o f the people.’ 41 This catches nicely the best spirit o f M odel i, the high point o f its optimism: the democratic franchise would not only protect the citizens, but would even improve the performance of the rich as governors. It is scarcely a spirit o f equality.

P R O T E C T I V E D E M O C R A C Y F O R M A R K E T MAN

This was the genesis o f the first modern model o f democracy. It is neither inspiring nor inspired. The democratic franchise provisions were put in the model only belatedly. It is hard to say what had the greater effect in m oving the founders o f this model to make their franchise democratic in principle: whether it was their realization that nothing less than ‘one man, one vote5 would placate a working class which was showing signs o f becoming seriously politically articulate (as is suggested by Bentham ’s remark in 1820 that he supposed they wouldn’ t be satisfied with less), or whether it was the sheer logic o f their own case for reform, resting as it did on the assumption of

42 The Life and Times o f Liberal Democracy

use, as affording no security for a good choice beyond that which would exist if no pecuniary qualification was required’ (Barker ed., p. 49).

41 ‘On the Ballot*, Westminster Review, July 1830.

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conflicting self-interested m axim izing individuals. Either way, it is clear that they allowed themselves a democratic conclu­sion only because they had convinced themselves that a vast m ajority o f the working-class would be sure to follow the ad­vice and example o f ‘ that intelligent, that virtuous rank5, the middle class. It is on that note that James M ill closed his somewhat ambiguous case for a democratic franchise.

In this founding model o f dem ocracy for a modern indus­trial society, then, there is no enthusiasm for democracy, no idea that it could be a m orally transformative force; it is nothing but a logical requirement for the governance o f in­herently self-interested conflicting individuals who are assumed to be infinite desirers o f their own private benefits. Its advocacy is based on the assumption that man is an infinite consumer, that his overriding motivation is to maximize the flow o f satis­factions, or utilities, to himself from society, and that a national society is simply a collection of such individuals. Responsible government, even to the extent o f responsibility to a democratic electorate, was needed for the protection of individuals and the promotion o f the Gross National Product, and for nothing more.

I have drawn a harsh, but I think fair, portrait o f the found­ing model o f modern Western democracy. It has nothing in common with any o f the earlier, pre-industrial visions o f a dem ocratic society. The earlier visions had asked for a new kind o f man. The founding model o f liberal dem ocracy took man as he was, man as he had been shaped by market society, and assumed that he was unalterable. It was on this point chiefly that John Stuart M ill and his humanist liberal followers in the twentieth century attacked the Benthamist model. But as we shall see, in the next chapter, they were not able to get entirely away from it. For that model did fit, remarkably well, the competitive capitalist market society and the individuals who had been shaped by it. And that society and those individuals were still well entrenched, in spite of the humanist revulsion against them, later in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth. The revulsion was w hat sparked the formula­tion o f M odel 2, first by John Stuart M ill; but the entrench­ment o f the market society and market man sapped the strength o f M odel 2 from the beginning.

Model i: Protective Democracy 43

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I l l

Model 2: Developmental Democracy

T H E E M E R G E N C E OF M O D E L 2

W e have seen that Bentharn and James M ill had no vision of a new kind o f society or a new kind of man. They did not need such a vision, because they did not question that their model of society— the hard-driving competitive market society with all its class-division— was justified by its high level o f material productivity, and that the inequality was inevitable. In any case, it was a law o f human nature that every individual would always be trying to exploit everyone else, so nothing could be done about society. A ll that could be done was to prevent governments oppressing the governed, and for this a mechani­cal protective democratic franchise was sufficient.

But by about the middle o f the nineteenth century two changes in that society were thrusting themselves on the atten­tion of liberal thinkers, changes which required a quite differ­ent model o f dem ocracy. O ne change was that the working class (which Bentham and James M ill had thought not dan­gerous) was beginning to seem dangerous to property. The other was that the condition o f the working class was becoming so blatantly inhum an that sensitive liberals could not accept it as either m orally justifiable or economically inevitable. Both these changes raised new difficulties for liberal-democratic theory— difficulties which, as we shall see, were never fully overcome. But those changes did make it clear that a new model o f dem ocracy was needed. It was first provided by John Stuart M ill.

T h at the younger M ill did arrive at his M odel 2 because o f the two actual changes is evident from his own writings. He

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was very much aware o f the growing m ilitancy o f the working class: the revolutions o f 1848 in Europe, and the phenomenon o f the Chartist movement in England, made a strong impres­sion on him. So did the increasing literacy o f the working class, the spread o f working-class newspapers, and the increase in working-class organizing ability shown in the growth of trade unions and mutual benefit societies. M ill was convinced that ‘the poor’ could not be shut out or held down much longer.

Thus in the Political Economy he wrote, in 1848:

O f the working men, at least in the more advanced countries of Europe, it may be pronounced certain, that the patriarchal or paternal system of government is one to which they will not again be subject. That question was decided, when they were taught to read, and allowed access to newspapers and political tracts; when dissenting preachers were suffered to go among them, and appeal to their faculties and feelings in opposition to the creeds professed and countenanced by their superiors; when they were brought to­gether in numbers, to work socially under the same roof; when rail­ways enabled them to shift from place to place, and change their patrons and employers as easily as their coats; when they were encouraged to seek a share in the government, by means of the electoral franchise. The working classes have taken their interests into their own hands, and are perpetually showing that they think the interests of their employers not identical with their own, but opposite to them. Some among the higher classes flatter themselves that these tendencies may be counteracted by moral and religious education: but they have let the time go by for giving an education which can serve their purpose. The principles of the Reformation have reached as low down in society as reading and writing, and the poor will not much longer accept morals and religion of other people’s prescribing. . . . The poor have come out of leading- strings and cannot any longer be governed or treated like children.. . . Whatever advice, exhortation or guidance is held out to the labouring classes, must henceforth be tendered to them as equals, and accepted by them with their eyes open. The prospect of the future depends on the degree in which they can be made rational beings.1

The conclusion that something must be done had been made explicit in 1845 in the lesson he drew from the Chartist move­m en t

1 Principles o f Political Economy, Bk IV, ch, 7, sects. 1 and 2; in Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson, Toronto and London, 1965, iii. 761-3.

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46 The Life and Times o f Liberal Democracy

The democratic movement among the operative classes, com­monly known as Chartism, was the first open separation of interest, feeling, and opinion, between the labouring portion of the common­wealth and all above them. It was the revolt of nearly all the active talent, and a great part of the physical force, of the working classes, against their whole relation to society. Conscientious and sympath­izing minds among the ruling classes, could not but be strongly impressed by such a protest. They could not but ask themselves, with misgiving, what there was to say in reply to it ; how the existing social arrangements could best be justified to those who deemed themselves aggrieved by them. It seemed highly desirable that the benefits derived from those arrangements by the poor should be made less questionable— should be such as could not easily be over­looked. If the poor had reason for their complaints, the higher classes had not fulfilled their duties as governors; if they had no reason, neither had those classes fulfilled their duties in allowing them to grow up so ignorant and uncultivated as to be open to these mischievous delusions. While one sort of minds among the more fortunate classes were thus influenced by the political claims put forth by the operatives, there was another description upon whom that phenomenon acted in a different manner, leading, however, to the same result. While some, by the physical and moral circum­stances which they saw around them, were made to feel that the condition of the labouring classes ought to be attended to, others were made to see that it would be attended to, whether they wished to be blind to it or not. The victory of 1832, due to the manifesta­tion, though without the actual employment, of physical force, had taught a lesson to those who, from the nature of the case, have always the physical force on their side; and who only wanted the organization, which they were rapidly acquiring, to convert their physical power into a moral and social one. It was no longer dis­putable that something must be done to render the multitude more content with the existing state of things.2

One of the things that had to be done £to render the m ulti­tude more content with, the existing state of things’ was to abandon or transform the Benthamite models o f m an and society. Although John Stuart M ill hoped that the w orking. class m ight in the future become rational enough to accept the laws o f political economy (as he understood them), he could not expect that they would accept Bentham ’s view that the working class was inevitably doomed to near-indigence. N or

2 ‘The Claims of Labour5 (1845), reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions(1867), ii. 188-90; Collected Works, ed, Robson, 1967, iv. 369-70.

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did he want them to accept that view, which he believed to be false. He thought they could pull themselves up out o f their miserable condition. And he was anxious that they should do so, for he was m orally revolted by the life they were compelled to lead. The extent o f M ill’s abandonment or transformation o f the Benthamite models o f man, o f society, and of democracy, will appear as we look closely (in the next section) at M ill’s theory, but some o f the essential differences can be sketched now.

The striking difference in the models o f democracy is in the purpose which a democratic political system was supposed to have. M ill did not overlook the sheerly protective function of a dem ocratic franchise— the function o f which James M ill and Bentham had made so much. The people needed to be pro­tected against the government: ‘human beings are only secure from evil at the hands o f others, in proportion as they have the power o f being, and are, sz\£-protecting.,s But he saw some­thing even more important to be protected, namely, the chances o f the improvement o f mankind. So his emphasis was hot on the mere holding operation, but on what dem ocracy could contribute to human development. M ill’s model of dem ocracy is a moral model. W hat distinguishes it most sharp­ly from M odel 1 is that it has a moral vision o f the possibility o f the improvem ent o f mankind, and o f a free and equal society not yet achieved. A democratic political system is valued as a means to that improvement— a necessary though not a sufficient m eans; and a democratic society is seen as both a result o f that improvem ent and a means to further im prove­ment. The improvem ent that is expected is an increase in the amount o f personal self-development o f all the members o f the society, or, in John Stuart M ill’s phrase, the ‘advancement of community . . . in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency’ . The case for a democratic political system is that it promotes this advancem ent better than any other political system as well as m aking the best use of the amount o f ‘moral, intellectual and active worth already existing, so as to operate with the greatest effect on public affairs’ .4 The worth of an

3 Considerations on Representative Government, ch. 3, in Collected Works, ed. J. M . Robson, vol. xix, Toronto and London, 1977, p. 404.

4 Ibid., ch. 2, p. 392.

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individual is judged by the extent to which he develops his human capacities: ‘ the end o f man . . . is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and con­sistent whole.’ 5

This takes us to the root o f M ill’s model o f democracy. The root is a model o f man very different from that on which M odel i was based. M an is a being capable o f developing his powers or capacities. T h e hum an essence is to exert and develop them. M an is essentially not a consumer and appro- priator (as he was in M odel i ) but an exerter and developer and enjoyer of his capacities. The good society is one which permits and encourages everyone to act as exerter, developer, and enjoyer o f the exertion and development, o f his or her own capacities. So M ill’s model o f the desirable society was very different from the model of society to which M odel x o f demo­cracy was fitted.

In offering this model of man and of the desirable society M ill set the tone which came to prevail in liberal-democratic theory, and which dominated at least the Anglo-Am erican concept of dem ocracy until about the middle of the twentieth century. The narrowing stipulation John Stuart M ill put in his model was dropped by later advocates o f developmental democracy, but the central vision and the argument for it stayed much the same. This is the dem ocracy o f L. T . Hob- house and A. D. Lindsay and Ernest Barker, o f W oodrow Wilson and John D ewey and R. M. M a clver: it is the demo­cracy that W orld W ar I was to make the world safe for. It still touches a chord, especially when liberal societies are con­fronted by totalitarian ones, although as we shall see it has now been pretty well rejected in favour of what is said to be a more realistic model, the M odel 3 that we shall be examining in the next chapter. But Model, 2 is worth considerable attention, i f only because efforts now being made to go beyond M odel 3, to re-moralize dem ocracy under the banner o f participatory democracy (our M odel 4), encounter some of the same difficulties as did M odel 2, and will need to learn from its failure.

The difficulties encountered by M odel 2 in its first formulation5 On Liberty, ch. 3; in Collected Works, xviii. 261, quoting Humboldt.

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were somewhat different from those that beset the later version. So it will be useful to look at the two versions in turn, as Models 2a and 2B. One difference between them m ay be stated briefly in advance. M ill had been deeply troubled by the incom patibility he saw between the claims o f equal human development and the existing class inequalities o f power and wealth. Although he did not identify the problem accurately, and so was unable to resolve it even in theory, he did see that there was a problem and did try to deal with it, at least to the extent o f concerning himself with the necessary social and economic prerequisites o f democracy. His twentieth-century followers scarcely saw this as a problem, at least not as the central problem : when they did not let it drop virtually out o f sight, they treated it &s something which would or could be overcome in one w ay or another— for instance, by a revival o f idealist morality, or a new level o f social knowledge and com­munication.

Indeed one can see a cum ulative decline in realism from M odel 1 through Models 2a and 2B. Bentham and James M ill, in formulating M odel 1, had recognized that capitalism entailed great class inequalities o f power and wealth: they were realistic about the necessary structure of capitalist society, though untroubled by it since it did not conflict with their merely protective democracy. John Stuart M ill, in his M odel 2A, was less realistic about the necessary structure of capitalist society.: he saw the existing class inequality, and saw

"tliat.it was incompatible with his developmental democracy, "But" thought it accidental and remediable. The twentieth- century exponents o f developmental democracy (our Model 2b ) were even less realistic than M ill on this score: they generally wrote as i f class issues had given way, or were giving way, to pluralistic differences which were not only more m anageable but also positively beneficial. And on. top o f this there was a new unrealism in M odel 2B, a descrip­tive unrealism.

There had been no question o f the two earlier models (1 and 2a) being realistic as descriptions o f an existing democratic system, for in no country in the nineteenth century were governments chosen by manhood suffrage, let alone universal

Model 2: Developmental Democracy 49

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suffrage.6 The two earlier models were statements o f what would be necessary to achieve at least protection and at best self-development for all. But by the first h alf o f the twentieth century, with at least full manhood suffrage the general rule in advanced Western countries, a model could reasonably be expected also to be realistic as a descriptive statement. M odel 2B did offer itself as a statement o f what the existing system essentially was (which often meant, rather, what the present imperfect system was capable o f becoming), as well as a statement o f its desirability. But as a statement o f how the democratic system actually worked M odel 2B was seriously inaccurate, as was demonstrated by the exponents o f M odel 3. M odel 2B may thus be said to have been doubly unrealistic: it failed both to grasp the necessary implications o f capitalist society and to describe the actual twentieth-century liberal- democratic system.

T o anticipate our argument one further stage, it m ay now be said that the currently prevalent M odel 3, which boasts its realism both as a descriptive and explanatory model and as a demonstration o f the necessary limits o f the democratic princi­ple o f effective citizen participation, will be found to fall short on both counts.

MODE L 2 A : J. s. M I L L ’ S D E V E L O P M E N T A L D E M O C R A C Y

I have emphasized how different J. S. M ill’s model o f a desir­able society was from Bentham ’s and James M ill’s. The differ­ence can be made more precise. Bentham and James M ill accepted existing capitalist society without reservation; John Stuart M ill did not. The difference is clearly expressed in the

6 Although most states in the, United States had manhood white fran­chise by about the middle of the nineteenth century, manhood franchise can scarcely be said to have been effectively in existence in the United States until the twentieth century. A few European countries in the nineteenth century (France 1848, Germany 1871) had manhood franchise for the national assembly, but the assembly did not choose or control the govern­ment. In the United Kingdom, as late as 1911 only 59 per cent of adult males had the franchise, that is, had their names on the parliamentary electoral roll. See Neal Blewett: ‘The Franchise in the United Kingdom 1885-1918’, Past and Presenty no. 32 (Dec. 1965).

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younger M ill’s position on the desirability o f ‘ the stationary state’ which he, like they, thought would be the culmination of capitalism: they regarded it with dismay, he welcomed it. As he put it in 1B48:

I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of strug­gling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and tread­ing on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the dis­agreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. It may be a necessary stage in the progress of civilization . . . But it is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in realizing . . . In the meantime, those who do not accept the present very early stage of human improvement as its ultimate type, may be excused for being com­paratively indifferent to the kind of economic progress which excites the congratulations of ordinary politicians; the mere increase of production and accumulation.7

Society, in the vision o f M odel 2, need not be, should not be, w hat M odel 1 had assumed it was and always would be. It need not be and should not be a collection o f competing, conflicting, self-interested consumers and appropriators. It could and should be a comm unity o f exerters and developers o f their human capacities. But it was not that now. The prob­lem was to get it to advance to that. The case for democracy was that it gave all the citizens a direct interest in the actions o f the government, and an incentive to participate actively, at least to the extent o f voting for or against the government, and, it was hoped, also o f informing themselves and forming their views in discussions with others. Com pared with any oligarchic system, however benevolent, dem ocracy drew the people into the operations o f government by giving them all a practical interest, an interest which could be effective because their votes could bring down a governm ent Dem ocracy would thus make people more active, more energetic; it would advance them ‘in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency’ .

7 Principles o f Political Economy, Bk. IV , ch. 6, sect. a ; in Collected Works,

»*• 754- 5-

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This is a rather large claim to make for a system o f repre­sentative government in which the ordinary person’s political activity is confined to voting every few years for a member o f Parliament, perhaps a little oftener for local councillors, and perhaps actually holding some elective local office. Even so, the claim m ight be allowed by contrast with any oligarchic system, which positively discourages general interest and in­volvement. By that contrast, democracy might seem to lead to self-sustaining, even self-increasing, advancement o f the citi­zens in moral, intellectual, and active worth, every bit of participation giving an ability and an appetite for more.

But here M ill came up against a difficulty which turned out to be insuperable. T o see w hat it was we must look at another basic difference between John Stuart M ill and Bentham. Underlying the difference in their moral evaluations o f existing society was a difference in their definitions o f happiness or pleasure, the thing they both held should be maximized,

Bentham had held that in calculating the greatest happiness one need take into account only the amounts o f undifferenti­ated pleasure (and pain) actually felt by the individuals. There were no qualitative differences between pleasures: pushpin was as good as poetry. And since, as we have seen, he measured pleasure or utility in terms o f material wealth, the aggregate greatest happiness o f the whole society was to be attained by m aximizing productivity (though even that conclusion was fallacious, as we have noticed).

J. S. M ill insisted, on the contrary, that there were qualita­tive differences in pleasures, and he refused to equate the greatest aggregate happiness with maximum productivity. The greatest aggregate happiness was to be got by permitting and encouraging individuals to develop themselves. T h at would make them capable o f higher pleasures, and so would increase the aggregate pleasure measured in both quantity and quality.

But at the same time-— and this was the fundamental diffi­culty— M ill recognized that the existing distribution o f wealth and o f economic power made it impossible for most members o f the working class to develop themselves at all, or even to live humanly. He denounced as utterly unjust

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Model 2: Developmental Democracy 53

that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour— the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in a descending scale, the remunera­tion dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life . . ,8

This, he said, was the very opposite o f the only ‘equitable principle’ o f property, the principle o f ‘proportion between remuneration and exertion’ . T hat was the equitable principle because the only justification o f the institution of private prop­erty was that it guaranteed to individuals ‘the fruits o f their own labour and abstinence’ , not ‘the fruits o f the labour ond abstinence o f others’ .9

A few pages later M ill gave an extended definition o f prop­erty :

The institution of property, when limited to its essential elements, consists in the recognition, in each person, of a right to the exclusive disposal of what he or she have produced by their own exertions, or received either by gift or by fair agreement, without force or fraud, from those who produced it. The foundation of the whole is, the right o f producers to what they themselves have produced.10

This seems a reasonable extension o f the principle first an­nounced, at least as far as ‘fair agreement’ is concerned, though ‘gift’ raises a problem. W ithout a property right in what one has exchanged by agreement for the fruits o f one’s labour, not even the simplest exchange economy would be possible. But M ill is talking about a capitalist exchange economy, where the produce is the result o f the combination o f current labour with capital provided by someone else, and where the labourer gets as his share only a wage, and the capitalist gets the rest, both shares being determined by market competition. M ill held that this relation was justified also. Speaking of the capitalist’s acquisition from the wage contract, he w rote:

The right of property includes, then, the freedom of acquiring by contract. The right of each to what he has produced, implies a right

8 Ibid., Bk. II, ch. i, sect. 3, p..207.9 Ibid., p. 208.10 Ibid., Bk. II, ch. 2, sect. 1, p. 215.

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to what has been produced by others, if obtained by their free con­sent; since the producers must either have given it from good will, or exchanged it for what they esteemed an equivalent, and to pre­vent them from doing so would be to infringe their right of property in the product of their own industry.11

The owner o f the capital, M ill saw, must have a share o f the product, and he held that this was consistent with the equitable principle because capital is simply the product o f previous labour and abstinence. This justified the distribution o f the product between wage-labourers and owners o f cap ita l: given competition between capitalists for labourers, and between labourers for employment, there was a fair division between those who contributed current labour and those who contri­buted the fruits o f past labour and abstinence. M ill acknow­ledged that the capital was not usually created by the labour and abstinence o f the present possessor, but thought he had made a sufficient case for the labour/capital distribution by saying that the present possessor o f capital ‘much more prob­ably’ got it by gift or voluntary contract than by wrongful dispossession o f those who had created it by their past labour.12

The fact that the present possessors m ay have got some o f their capital by gift, i.e. by inheritance, gave M ill some un­easiness: it seemed clearly inconsistent with his equitable principle o f property. But he held that the right to dispose of one’s property by bequest was an essential part o f the right of property. The farthest he was willing to go was to recommend a limit on the amount any one person could inherit, but he set the limit so high— each could inherit enough £to afford the means o f comfortable independence’13— -that this did nothing to resolve the inconsistency. M ill fell back on the argument that ‘while it is true that the labourers are at a disadvantage compared with those whose predecessors had saved, it is also true that the labourers are far better off than if those pre­decessors had not saved.’14

11 Ibid., p. 217.12 Ibid., pp. 215-16.13 Ibid., Bk. II, ch. 2, sect. 4, p. 225.14 Ibid., Bk. II, ch. 2, sect. 1, p. 216.

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Thus M ill was satisfied that there was no inconsistency be­tween his equitable principle o f property— reward in propor­tion to exertion— and the principle o f reward in proportion to the market value o f both the capital and the current labour required for capitalist production.

Y et, as we have seen, he found the actual prevailing distri­bution o f the produce o f labour wholly unjust. He found the explanation o f that unjust distribution in an historical acci­dent, not in the capitalist principle itself.

T h e principle o f private property has never yet had a fair trial in any cou n try; and less so, perhaps, in this country than in some others. T h e social arrangem ents o f m odern E urope com m enced from a distribution o f property w hich was the result, not o f just partition, or acquisition b y industry, but o f conquest and vio le n ce: and notw ithstanding w h at industry has been doing for m any cen­turies to m odify the work o f force, the system still retains m any and large traces o f its origin.15

It was this original violent distribution o f property, not any­thing in the principle o f private property and capitalist enter­prise as such, that had led to the present miserable position of the bulk o f the working class, about the injustice o f which M ill was so outspoken: ‘The generality o f labourers in this and most other countries, have as little choice of occupation or freedom o f locomotion, are practically as dependent on fixed rules and on the w ill o f others, as they could be on any system short o f actual slavery.’16

In thus putting the blame on the original feudal forcible distribution o f property, and the failure o f subsequent prop­erty law to rectify it, M ill was able to think that the capitalist principle was not in any w ay responsible for the existing in­equitable distributions o f wealth, income, and power, and even to think that it was gradually reducing them. W hat he failed to see was that the capitalist market relation enhances or replaces any original inequitable distribution, in that it gives to capital part o f the value added by current labour, thus steadily in­creasing the mass o f capital. H ad M ill seen this he could not

15 Ibid., Bk. II, ch. i, sect. 3, p. 207.16 Ibid., p. 209.

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have judged the capitalist principle consistent with his equit­able principle. Failing to see this, he found no fundamental inconsistency, and was not troubled by it.

However, the present debased position o f the bulk o f the working class did present an immediate and serious problem to M ill, and he met it forthrightly. The difficulty was that in their present condition they were incapable o f using political power wisely. M ill believed indeed that people were capable o f becom­ing something other than self-interested acquirers o f benefit for themselves, but he thought that most o f them had not yet got much beyond that. It would be foolish, he said, to expect the average man, i f given the power to vote, to use it with ‘dis­interested regard for others, and especially for what comes after them, for the idea o f posterity, o f their country, or of m ankind5.

Governm ents must be m ade for hum an beings as they are, or as they are cap able o f speedily b eco m in g: and in any state o f cu ltiva­tion w hich m ankind, or any class am ong them , h ave yet attained, or are likely soon to attain, the interests b y w hich they w ill be led, w hen they are thinking only o f self-interest, w ill be alm ost exclu­sively those w hich are obvious at first sight, and w hich operate on their present condition.17

This being so, what would happen i f everyone had a vote? Presumably the selfish society would continue.

But there was worse to be feared than that. For M ill recog­nized that modern societies were divided into two classes with interests which they believed to be opposed, and which in important respects M ill granted were opposed. The classes were, roughly, the working class (in which he included petty tradesmen) and the employing class, including those who lived on unearned income and those ‘whose education and w ay of life assimilate them with the rich’ .18 The working class was of course the more num erous.‘O ne persoiyone yo.tei-would there­fore mean class legislatiorfin the supposed immediate interest o f one class, who must be expected ‘to follow their own selfish inclinations and short-sighted notions o f their own good, in

17 Representative Government, ch. 6; in Collected Works, xix, 445,18 Ibid., p. 447.

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opposition to justice, at the expense o f all other classes and of posterity’ .19 Something must therefore be done to prevent the more numerous class from being able to ‘direct the course of legislation and administration by its exclusive class interest’ (even though this would be less o f an evil than the present class rule by a small class based merely on established w ealth).20

M ill’s dilemma was a real one, for his m ain case for a uni­versal franchise was that it was essential as a means o f getting people to develop themselves by participation. M ill’s w ay out was to recommend a system o f plural voting for members of the smaller class, such that neither o f the two classes should outweigh the other, and neither therefore would be able to impose ‘class legislation’.21

Everyone should have a vote, but some should have several votes. O r rather, everyone with certain exceptions should have a vote, and some should have several votes. In his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, published in 1859, M ill held that a perfect electoral system required both that every person should have one vote and that some should have more than one vote, and said that neither o f these provisions was admissible without the other. But in Representative Government (1861) he argued for plural votes for some along with the exclusion of others from any vote at all. The exclusions reflect M ill’s acceptance o f the standards o f the market society. Those in receipt o f poor relief were to be excluded: they had failed in the market. So were undischarged bankrupts. So were all who did not pay direct taxes. M ill knew that the poor paid indirect taxes, but, he said, they didn’t feel them, and therefore would be reckless in using their votes to demand government largess. The direct tax requirem ent was not intended to deprive the poor o f a vote: the w ay out was to replace some o f the indirect taxes by a direct head tax which even the poorest would pay. Again, those who could fiot read, write, and reckon, were to be ex­cluded. This also was not intended as a back-handed way o f excluding a large number o f the poor, for M ill held that society had a duty to put elementary schooling within reach o f

19 I b id ., p. 446.20 Ibid., ch. 8, p. 467.21 Ibid., ch. 8, p. 476.

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all who wanted it. But it would effectively have excluded the poor, for he held that when society had failed to perform this duty (as it clearly had in M ill’s time), the exclusion from the franchise o f those who suffered from that failure was ‘a hard­ship that ought to be borne5.22

W hether or not any o f these provisions would have excluded a significant number o f the working class, plural voting was still needed, and was recommended on an additional ground. The system o f plural voting would not only prevent class legis­lation : it would be positively beneficial by giving more votes to 'those whose opinion is entitled to a greater weight’ 23 by virtue o f their superior intelligence, or the superior develop­ment o f their intellectual or practical abilities. The rough test o f this was the nature o f a person's occupation: employers, men o f business, and professional people are by the nature of their work generally more intelligent or more knowledgeable than ordinary wage-earners, so they should have more votes. Foremen, as more intelligent than ordinary labourers, and skilled labourers as more intelligent than unskilled, might also be allowed more than one vote each. To meet M ill’s stipula­tion that the working class as a whole should not have more votes than the employing and propertied class, members o f the latter would have to be given considerably more than two votes each, but M ill excused himself from working out the details. The closest he came to doing so was his suggestion in Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform that, i f the unskilled labourer had one vote, a skilled labourer should have two; a foreman perhaps three; a farmer, manufacturer, or trader, three or four; a professional or literary man, an artist, a public func­tionary, a university graduate, and an elected member o f a learned society, five or six.24 M ill’s.gradations are revealing: the entrepreneur (‘farmer, manufacturer, or trader’ ), with three or four votes, is not m uch preferred to the foreman, while the intellectuals, artists, and professional people, with five or six votes, are the strongly preferred rank. It is curious,

22 Ibid., ch. 8, p. 470.2s Ibid., ch. 8, p. 474.24 Collected Works, xix. 324-5.

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incidentally, in view o f M ill’s concern for the rights of women, that he did not suggest how the entitlement o f those women who were neither employed nor employers, nor professional or propertied persons, to plural votes was to be determined.

The important point o f principle in all this is that M ill argued explicitly that plural voting on grounds o f superior attainments was positively desirable, not merely negatively desirable as a way o f preventing class legislation:

I do not propose the p lu rality as a thing in itself undesirable, w hich, like the exclusion o f part o f the com m unity from the suffrage, m ay be tem porarily tolerated w hile necessary to prevent greater evils. I do not look upon equal voting as am ong the things w hich are good in themselves, provided they can be guarded against inconveniences. I look upon it as only relatively good; less objec­tionable than inequality o f privilege grounded on irrelevant or adventitious circum stances, but in principle wrong, because recog­nizing a w rong standard, and exercising a bad influence on the voter’s m ind. It is not useful, but hurtful, that the constitution o f the country should declare ignorance to be entitled to as m uch political pow er as know ledge.25

So John Stuart M ill cannot be ranked as a full egalitarian. Some individuals were not only better than others, but better in ways directly relevant to the political process, better in ways that entitled them to more political weight. True, part o f the reason why they were to be given greater weight was that this would make for a better society, at least negatively: it would reduce the likelihood o f short-run narrowly selfish interests being predominant in legislation and government, which would be the outcome o f equal weighting. Unequal weighting w ould be more likely to lead to a society democratic in the best sense, a society where everyone could develop his or her hum an capacities to the fullest. Nevertheless, unequal political weights for citizens were built into M ill’s model on a ground w hich seems more permanent: as long as people were unequal in knowledge (and when would they not be?) equal weighting was wrong in principle.

The w eighting M ill gave to knowledge and skill led him also to recommend that Parliam ent should not itself initiate any

25 Representative Government, ch. 8, p. 478 (my italics).

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legislation but should be confined to approving or rejecting, or sending back for reconsideration but not itself amending, legislative proposals all o f which would be sent up to it by an expert non-elected Commission. M ill’s impatience with exist­ing parliam entary and cabinet procedure is understandable, but his remedy would reduce the power o f the elected legis­lature, and so would contribute to the disincentive o f demo­cratic voters to participate in the electoral process. I f he realized this, he didn’t mind it, such was the premium he placed on expertise.

So M ill’s model, the original version o f M odel 2, is arith­m etically a step backward from M odel 1, which had stipulated, in principle at least, ‘one person, one vote’ . But in its moral dimension M odel 2 is more democratic than M odel 1. M odel 2 is not satisfied with individuals as they are, with man as infinite consumer and appropriator. It wants to move towards a society o f individuals more hum anly developed and more equally so. It wants not to impose a utopia on the people but to have the people reach the goal themselves, im proving them- selves by participating actively in the political process, every instalment o f participation leading to an improvement in their political capacity, as well as their all-round development, and making them capable o f more participation and more self­development.

It is easy now to point to defects and contradictions in M ill’s model. A n obvious one is in the matter o f participation and self-development. Participation in the political process was necessary to improve people’s quality and would improve it. But participation with equal weight now would reinforce low quality. Therefore those who had already attained superior quality, as judged by their education or station in life, must not be made to yield their power to the rest. In the name of equal self-development, a veto is given to those who are already more developed. But the less developed individuals within M ill’s model, i f they stayed within it (that is, i f they accepted the inferior electoral weight M ill gave them), would know that their wills could not prevail, so would not have much incentive to participate, so would not become more developed.

A deeper difficulty, which is at the root o f that one, is in

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M ill’s model o f man and o f society. M en as shaped by the existing competitive market society were not good enough to make themselves better. M ill deplored the effects o f the exist­ing market society on the human character, which made everybody an aggressive scrambler for his own material bene­fit. He deplored most strongly the existing relation between capital and labour, which debased both capitalist and labourer. H e believed there could not be a decently human society until that relation was transformed. He put his hopes on an enor­mous spreading o f producers’ co-operatives, whereby work­men would become their own capitalists and work for themselves jointly. He allowed himself to hope that producers’ co-ops would call forth such better workmanship, and thus be so much more efficient units o f production, that they would displace the capitalist organization of production.

Y et he accepted and supported the received capitalist prop­erty institutions, at least until such time as they had been modified or transformed by his producer’s co-ops; and even then the competitive m arket system would still operate, for the separate co-operative enterprises were expected to compete in the market, and would be driven by the incentive o f desire for individual gain. In other words, M ill accepted and supported a system which required individuals to act as m axim izing con­sumers and appropriators, seeking to accumulate the means to ensure their future flow o f consumer satisfactions, which meant seeking to acquire property. A system which requires men to see themselves, and to act, as consumers and appro­priators, gives little scope for most o f them to see themselves and act as exerters and developers o f their capacities. M ill did indeed hold out the prospect that the spread o f co-operatives would bring a ‘moral revolution to society’ :

the healing o f the standing feud betw een cap ital and la b o u r; the transform ation o f hum an life, from a conflict o f classes struggling for opposite interests, to a friendly rivalry in the pursuit o f a good com m on to a l l ; the elevation o f the d ign ity o f la b o u r; a new sense o f security and independence in the labouring class; and the con­version o f each hum an being’s d aily occupation into a school o f the social sym pathies and the practical intelligence.26

26 Political Economy, Bk. IV , ch. 7, sect. 6; in Collected Works, iii. 792. This

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These high hopes remained unfulfilled. Class opposition con­tinued, and so long as it was not offset in other ways it would still require M ill’s watering down of democracy. For the rational behaviour o f each o f those classes is to try to overbear the opposed class, hence the danger M ill saw o f class govern­ment, hence the need to deny as much political weight to each member of the more numerous class as to each member o f the less numerous class, hence the Vicious circle o f unequal partici­pation justifying continued unequal participation.

The failure o f the co-operative solution thus left unresolved the contradiction M ill saw between a universal equal franchise and the greatest happiness o f society. There was no way out, given his assumption that the working class would use an equal franchise to enact class legislation not consistent with the long- run, qualitative, greatest happiness o f the whole society.

And underlying that contradiction was the other one, the contradiction between capitalist relations o f production as such and the democratic ideal of equal possibility o f individual self-development. This contradiction M ill never fully saw. He came close to seeing it in his strictures on the existing labou r- capital relation (especially when he was contrasting it morally with the co-operative relation); but, as we have noticed, in his analysis of capitalist market relations as such, he justified private property in capital, and the wage-contract, as being consistent in principle with an equitable system.

One might think that the existence of two such serious short­comings in M ill’s liberal-democratic theory would have been enough to prevent it maintaining, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the position it had won in mid-nineteenth century as the model o f liberal democracy. But this is not quite what, happened. And it is easy to see why.

In the first place, the underlying contradiction could be expected to lead to the abandonment o f the theory only i f M ill’s followers had seen it as a flaw in the theory. But in fact,

contrasts oddly with M ill’s statement in 1838: 'The numerical majority of any society whatever, must consist of persons ail standing in the same social position, and having in the main, the same pursuits, namely, unskilled manual labourers . . (Bentham’, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, Collected Works, x, 107).

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as we shall see in the last section of this chapter, the later liberal-democratic theorists showed even less recognition than M ill o f any fundamental incompatibility between capitalist market relations and the equal possibility o f individual self­development. So they could, and did, still hold to M ill’s case for developm ental democracy.

In the second place, the incom patibility M ill had seen be­tween a universal equal franchise and the existing opposition o f class interests seemed, by the beginning o f the twentieth century, to have disappeared. M ill’s fear o f class government i f there were a universal equal franchise had turned out to be unfounded, at least for the time being. Bentham and James M ill had been right about the working class following the lead o f the middle class, although as I shall suggest they were right for the wrong reasons. In any case, when the first large instal­ment o f manhood equal suffrage was introduced in England in 1884, eleven years after M ill’s death, and further instalments later, they did not bring class rule by the working class. So M ill’s followers could, and did, cheerfully abandon the in- egalitarian provisions o f his model— the plural voting and the downgrading o f the elected legislature in favour o f an expert legislative commission— while holding to his main develop­mental case.

W e should not, therefore, speak o f M odel 2 a as a failure. Its main lines continued to be generally accepted by liberal- democrats, the more easily because its inegalitarian stipula­tions could be dropped. They were dropped, partly because they came to appear unnecessary, and partly because it be­came clear that anything o f that sort would be unacceptable to forbiddingly strong popular movements.27 But this enabled the rest of M odel 2A to live on, as 2B, well into the twentieth century. The consistent success o f the reigning politicians in the nineteenth century, and o f the system itself in the twentieth

27 The strength of such movements was evident in the agitation for the 1867 Reform Bill, of which Mill was a close and concerned observer, He withdrew his undertaking to endorse the radical Reform League when he found that it was appealing to physical force to attain its uncompromising franchise demands. (Mill to W. R. Gremer, i March 1867, Later Letters; in Collected Works, xvi. 1247-8.) See also Roy den Harrison: Before the Socialists, Studies in Labour and Politics i8 6 i- i8 8 r , London and Toronto, 1965, ch. 3.

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century, in deflecting the menacing implications o f the demo­cratic franchise, delayed the failure o f M odel 2 until the mid-twentieth century. And it failed then not because its mid-twentieth-century critics, the exponents o f M odel 3, had realized or exposed the internal contradictions in M odel 2, for they did not. It failed for different reasons, which we must now explore.

T H E T A M I N G OF T H E D E M O C R A T I C F R A N C H I S E

Before we look at the fortunes o f the later developmental model, we must examine the reason why the equal manhood franchise did not bring about the class government that M ill had feared, so that the w ay was left open for the later liberal- democrats to redeploy M ill’s general case. This will help us to understand both the sway o f the later developmental model down to about the middle o f the twentieth century, and its ultimate failure.

W hat happened was something which M ill did not foresee, perhaps could scarcely have foreseen. But the interesting thing is that the later developmental theorists, those who promoted M odel 2B, did not seem to see it or understand it, though they should have been able to see it by then. And I shall suggest that their failure to see it was w hat led to the failure o f 2B and its supersession by M odel 3.

The reason that the equal manhood franchise did not bring about the class government M ill had feared was the extra­ordinary success with which the party system was able to tame the democracy. This is im portant because, although it gave M odel 2 a new lease on life, it was in the end M odel 2’s un­doing. For it left the actual democratic political process largely unable to provide the effective d egree. o f participation its advocates claimed or hoped for it, and unable to promote that personal development and moral community which was the main rationale offered for liberal democracy. It is this which so undermined M odel 2 that it could be swept aside in mid­twentieth century by the apparently more realistic M odel 3 examined in the next chapter.

H ow did the party system rescue the developmental model

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and enable it to hold the field, in its revised equal-franchise form, for another h alf century or more? H ow was the party system able to prevent the class take-over that M ill had feared, and so allow the developmental image o f dem ocracy to be maintained by liberal advocates after the equal franchise had been introduced? A universal equal franchise would obviously give the preponderant voice to the wage-earning working class in the more industrialized countries, and to the farmers and other small independent operators (or a mixture o f them and wage-earners) in the less industrialized ones, and in both cases a conflict o f interests with established capitalist property was to be expected. H ow could a thing as m echanical and neutral as a system o f competing parties prevent the take-over o f power by the subordinate but more numerous class or classes? W ould not a party system, in so far as it efficiently represented the numerical weight o f the different interests, actually bring about the take-over rather than prevent it? Y et the take-over has been prevented, and through the instrumentality o f the party system, in all the Western democracies.

The w ay this has happened has been somewhat different in different countries, depending partly on the class composition o f the country, partly on whether there was a responsible non- democratic party system in operation before the arrival o f the democratic franchise, and partly on other differences o f national traditions. I cannot attempt here an analysis o f all the complex differences between the ways the party systems performed the same basic function in countries as different as England, the United States, Canada, and the various Western European nations. Y et it is not difficult to see, i f one shifts the focus slightly from that o f the usual descriptions o f the function o f the party system, that its m ain function is not merely to produce a stable political equilibrium but to produce a particular kind o f equilibrium.

I think it is not overstating the case to say that the ch ief function the party system has actually performed in Western democracies since the inception o f a democratic franchise has been to blunt the edge o f apprehended or probable class con­flict, or, i f you like, to moderate and smooth over a conflict o f class interests so as to save the existing property institutions and

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the market system from effective attack. This is less evident in America than in Europe, where the relation between party and class is generally more obvious. A nd it is less evident than it might be to twentieth-century observers anywhere, because of the very success of the party system in thrusting out o f sight class issues which in the nineteenth century had bulked much larger.

The function of blurring class lines and so mediating between conflicting class interests can be seen to be equally well per­formed by any of three varieties o f party system: (i) a two- party (or two dominant parties) system, even where the parties were intended to represent two opposed class interests, as in England with the Labour and Conservative parties; (2) a two- party (or two dominant parties) system where each main party is a loose organization o f m any regional and sectional interests, as in the United States and Canada; or (3) a m ulti-party sys­tem with so many parties that the government generally has to be a coalition, as in most Western European countries. In the first case, each party tends to move towards a middle posi­tion, which requires that it avoid an apparently class position. It must do this in order to be able to project an image of itself as a national party standing for the common good, w ith­out which image it fears it will not stand much chance o f long- run m ajority support. In the second case each o f the main parties is compelled to act in a similar way, only more so: each must offer a platform which is all things to all men and which is therefore very indefinite. True, in such a system, a third or fourth party m ay start with a position which has a specific class content, but i f such a party grows to a size that puts it within reach of being the second or first party, it has to do the same. In the third case, a really m ulti-party system, where no one party can usually expect a majority, no party can give an unequivocal undertaking to the electorate because both the party and the electorate jknow that the party w ill have to compromise continually in the coalition government.

Now it is true that none o f these three blurring systems could have operated as they have done if a bi-polar class-division in the country as a whole had overridden both the sense of national identity and all sectional, religious, ethnic, and other cross-currents. None o f the three systems could operate as they

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do if the num erically largest economic class were a single- minded class, whose members were not pulled in other direc­tions by such cross-currents or by traditional attachments. But as it happened, in all these countries, at the same time the democratic franchise was becoming operative, there were factors which weakened the expected bi-polar division between those who supported and those who seemed likely to reject the existing system of property and o f market competition. In nineteenth-century North Am erica, continental expansion and free land made the largest class, independent farmers and other small working proprietors, the epitome o f the petty-bourgeoisie: they wanted private capitalism and the market economy, pro­vided only it was not rigged in favour o f the capitalists o f the commercial metropolises. In the same period, the late nine­teenth and early twentieth centuries, the imperial expansion in which England and most o f the Western European countries were indulging allowed their governments to afford handouts to their electorates which reduced the working-class pressures for fundamental reforms. H ad it not been for these factors, the apparently neutral party system could not have done the job. But given these factors, without the party system it is unlikely that the job could have been done. The party system, in whichever of its variants, was the means by which the job o f blurring the still underlying class differences was done.

T h e party system had a built-in ability to do this because of another feature. W ith every extension o f the franchise, a party system becomes necessarily less responsible to the electorate. T ake the classic case o f the English party system. It had been the effective means of making and unmaking governments for h alf a century or more before there was anything like a demo­cratic franchise. As long as the franchise was confined to the propertied class, the relatively small number o f electors in each constituency made it possible for the electors to exert con­siderable influence, even control, over their elected member. And because the M .P.s could thus be held responsible to their constituents, or at least to the active party people in the con­stituency,-i.e. to the constituency party, however loosely organized it might be, they could not be dominated by the cabinet, i.e. the leading men in the parliam entary party.

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A ll this changed with the dem ocratization o f the franchise. Appeal to a mass electorate required the formation o f well- organized national parties outside the parliam entary parties. Effective organization required centrally controlled party machines. Endorsement by the party machine became vir­tually the only way of getting elected to Parliament. The cen­tral party leadership was therefore able to control its M .P.s. T he main power fell to the party leaders in Parliament, for they, i.e. the Prime Minister and his leading c a b le t ministers, commanded the threat o f expulsion from the party and the threat o f dissolving Parliam ent prematurely, thus compelling new elections. The cabinet was thus enabled to dominate Parliam ent to a high degree. It still does so.

N ot only is it able to do so : it is now required to do so. For the universal franchise brought a change in the basic job the political system had to do, a change which necessitated government control, rather than constituency or outside party control, o f the parliam entary party. Before the franchise be­came democratic, the function o f the system was to respond to the needs of shifting combinations o f various elements o f the propertied class, which could best be done by governments which were responsible, through the M .P.s, to the leading- constituents. But with the democratic franchise, the system has had to mediate between the demands o f two classes, those with and those without substantial property. This has meant that the system has continually to be arranging compromises, or at least apparent compromises. Continual compromise re­quires room for manoeuvre. It is the governm ent that must have this room. In a m ulti-party system, where every govern­ment is a coalition, this is understood. It is not always un­derstood that room for manoeuvre is just as necessary in a two-party (or two major parties) system, where the governm ent is normally all from one party. But room for manoeuvre is equally necessary there, for. what requires continual compromise is the opposition o f interests in the country, whether or not that opposi­tion is represented within the government. A government, especially a m ajority government, cannot have this room for manoeuvre i f it is held closely responsible even to the parlia­m entary party, let alone to the outside party as a whole

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through an annual party convention, or to the constituency parties. Every attempt, by democratic reform parties and movements in parliam entary countries, to make the govern­ment and the members o f parliam ent strictly responsible to the popular organization outside has failed. A sufficient reason for the failure is that such strict responsibility does not allow the room for manoeuvre and compromise which a government made up entirely from one party must have in order to carry out its function o f m ediating between opposed class interests in the whole society.

T h e general conclusion from this glance at the party system is that the party system has been the means o f reconciling universal equal franchise with the maintenance o f an unequal society. It has done so by blurring the issues and by diminish­ing governm ent’s responsibility to electorates. It has had to do both these things in order to perform the functions required o f it in an unequal society. It has thus necessarily failed to induce the widespread popular participation in the political process which M odel 2 required, and hence has failed to develop the active individual as citizen, and to promote moral community, as M odel 2 expected.

M O D E L 2 B:

T W E N T I E T H - C E N T U R Y D E V E L O P M E N T A L D E M O C R A C Y

W hile all this was happening, the rationale put forward by liberal democrats remained the developmental case— substan­tially M ill’s case minus the plural voting proposal.

I shall not take time to examine the democratic theories of the early twentieth-century writers in detail. But it m ay con­fidently be said that the tone, the ideal, and the basic justifica­tion are much the same as M ill’s in all the leading English and Am erican theorists o f the first h alf o f the twentieth century, whether in the philosophic idealist tradition (Barker, Lindsay, M aclver), or the pragmatist (Dewey), or the modified utili­tarian (Hobhouse). T h e only exceptions were the few theorists who explicitly tried to combine liberal values with some kind o f socialism (Cole, Laski), but they did not significantly deflect the liberal tradition. And in the main liberal tradition o f that

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period there was, by comparison even with M ill, a steady decline in the realism o f the analyses o f liberal democracy.

M ill had seen the contradiction between his developmental ideal and the class-divided and exploitive society o f his own time. He failed to resolve it, even in theory, because he had not identified it accurately: he did not see that it was a contradic­tion between capitalist relations of production as such and the developmental ideal. But at least he did not assume that the democratic political process could itself overcome the class division and exploitation. He put his hopes in other things as well— producers’ co-operatives, working-class education, etc. These hopes were not fulfilled, but at least he did not put all the burden on the democratic process itself.

The theorists o f the first h alf o f the twentieth century in­creasingly lost sight o f class and exploitation. They generally wrote as i f democracy itself, at least a democracy that em­braced the regulatory and welfare state, could do most o f what could be done, and most o f w hat needed to be done, to bring a good society. They were, indeed, not insensitive to problems o f the concentration o f private economic power; and they were not friendly towards the individualist ideology, which they saw underlying the existing order. Lindsay, for instance, was strongly against ‘the atomic individualism which has dogged modern democratic theory from the beginning’, which, oddly, he identified not only with Bentham but also with M arx. And he did not completely accept the existing control o f production by capital: ‘ the application to the government o f industry o f . . . democratic principles’ would be ‘the fulfilment’ o f demo­cracy. But what he thought sufficient for the democratic con­trol o f business was some control o f monopolistic business. The consumers’ sovereignty o f a fully competitive market economy was perfectly acceptable,. There was nothing wrong with capi­talist relations o f production as such. In the end, his hope for dem ocracy came down to a more lively flourishing o f pluralistic non-political democratic associations ‘like churches and universities’ .28

This neo-idealist pluralism was a strong current in early

28 A. D. Lindsay: The Essentials o f Democracy, 2nd edn., London, 1935, pp. 6, 5, 64 ff., 73-4.

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twentieth-century liberal-democratic theory. And there was some excuse, or at least some reason, for those theorists’ neglect o f class division. The democratic party system had apparently solved the problem: it had overcome the danger of class government. But they did not see how it had done this, that is, by reducing the democratic responsiveness o f governments to electorates, and so preventing class division from operating politically in any effective way. So they could, and did, write as i f the democratic process were an arrangement whereby rational, well-intentioned citizens, who had o f course a whole variety o f different interests, could adequately adjust their differences in the peaceful, rational, give-and-take o f parties and pressure groups and the free press. T h ey allowed them­selves to hope that the class issue would go a w a y : either that it was already being replaced by pluralistic social groups, or that it would be so reduced by the welfare and regulatory state that a democratic society would be consistent with a capitalist m arket society.

Thus Barker, while seeing an amount o f ‘class-debate’ that required giving some attention to ‘reckoning gain and loss between different classes and sections’ , and while recognizing that some redistribution o f rights between classes might be necessary i f ‘ the greatest number are to enjoy the greatest pos­sible development o f the capacities o f personality’ , considered such redistribution to be 'a matter for constant adjustment and readjustment, as social thought about justice grows and as the interpretation o f the principles o f liberty and equality broadens with its growth’ .29 And he thought that the adjustments now required ‘m ay well begin, and m ay even sometimes remain, at the level o f voluntary agreement between voluntary asso­ciations (those o f the workers and those o f the employers), an agreement based on voluntary consultation and issuing in voluntary co-operation,’ W hen in this w ay something had been worked out that was ‘so obviously best’ as to deserve to be made a general rule, state action would be appropriate. ‘In that case the State, which is not the enemy o f Society, but rather stands to it in something o f the relation in which a

29 Ernest Barker: Principles o f Social & Political Theory, Oxford, 1951, pp. 271-2.

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solicitor m ay stand to a family, will register and endorse this best as a rule for general application and enforcement.’ 30

The notion that class differences could be adjusted ‘as social thought about justice grows’, and that this could be done by voluntary class co-operation aided by a family-solicitor state, is something of a retreat from M ill’s appreciation of the class problem. It also makes M ill’s utilitarian analysis appear hard- headed and realistic in comparison with the later idealists’ reliance on goodwill.

In a similar vein, M aclver defined democratic states as those ‘in which the general will is inclusive o f the community as a whole or of at least the greater portion of the community, and is the conscious, direct, and active support o f the form of governm ent.’31 He specifically distinguished democratic states from class-controlled states, and found that in modern civiliza­tions classes shaded into one another and had ‘no determinate solidarity o f interest’ .32 He drew attention to the enormous range o f interest groups and associations, making up a social universe where there is ‘ceaseless motion and commotion, struggle and accord’ .33 And he saw the party system as the effective w ay o f reducing ‘the multitudinous differences of opinion to relatively simple alternatives’ .34 The task o f the democratic state, a task which it did perform, however roughly, was to express and enforce the general w ill by representing men as citizens rather than as holders o f particular interests.

T h e danger is not that p articu lar interests w ill not be focused and asserted but rather that the general interest m ay suffer dom ination through their urgency. A gain st this danger the ch ief b u lw ark is the state, because its organization presupposes and in some degree realizes the a ctiv ity o f the general will. Besides, w e must assume that through the rough m ethod o f po litical representation the ‘pluses and m inuses’ o f particularist and opposing aims w ill, as Rousseau said, in a m easiire cancel out.

30 Ibid., pp. 275-6.* 31 R. M. M aclver: The Modern State, Oxford, 1926, p. 342.

32 Ibid., p. 403.33 M aclver: The Web o f Government, New York, 1947, p. 435; cf. Modern

State, p. 461.34 Web o f Government, p. 214.

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. . . Men are n6t content to be represented simply as farmers or as engineers or as Anglicans or as lovers of music or any other art or recreation: they want also to be represented as citizens. Otherwise the unity of their individual lives is unexpressed, no less than the unity of society. This representation is achieved, no matter how roughly, through the development of the party system. We have seen that though parties are dominated by strong particular inter­ests they are in idea and in principle the formulations of the broader attitudes of citizenship. Unless they were, the state would fall to pieces.35

Thus M aclver offered his vision o f the essential function o f ‘ the state’ as a description o f the function actually performed, though imperfectly, by liberal-democratic states through their party systems. i

W hen we turn from the neo-idealist view to John D ew ey’s pragmatist view o f liberal democracies, we find it less indul­gent about their actual operation. Y et he held out as a possi­bility and a hope what the idealist pluralists treated as an achievement. H e had few illusions about the actual democratic system, or about the democratic quality of a society dominated by motives o f individual and corporate gain. The root diffi­culty lay not in any defects in the machinery o f government but in the fact that the dem ocratic public was ‘still largely inchoate and unorganized’, and unable to see what forces of economic and technological organization it was up against.36 There was no use tinkering with the political machinery: the prior problem was ‘that o f discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public m ay so recognize itself as to define and express its interests’ .37 T h e public’s present incompetence to do this was traced to its failure to understand the technological and scientific forces which had made it so help­less. The remedy was to be sought in more, and more widespread, social knowledge: ‘dem ocracy is a name for a life o f free and enriching communion. It had its seer in W alt W hitman. It will have its consummation when free social enquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art o f full and m oving comm unication.’ 38

35 Modern State, pp. 465-6.36 John Dewey: The Public and Its Problems (1927}, Denver, 1954, p. 109.37 Ibid., p. 146.38 Ibid., p. 184.

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W hat was needed was not just more education— a remedy to which many earlier liberals had had recourse— but an im­provement in the social sciences by applying the experimental method and ‘the method o f co-operative intelligence’ .39 ‘The essential need . . . is the improvement o f the methods and conditions of debate* discussion and persuasion. T h at is the problem of the public. . . . this improvement depends essen­tially upon freeing and perfecting the processes o f inquiry and of dissemination o f their conclusions.40

Also needed was a large measure o f social control o f economic forces. W riting under the im pact o f the great depression, Dewey argued for ‘a planned co-ordination o f industrial development’, preferably by voluntary agreement, perhaps by way of a ‘co-ordinating and directive council in which captains o f industry and finance would meet with representatives of labor and public officials to plan the regulation o f industrial activity . . in any case, ‘ the introduction of social respon­sibility into our business system to such an extent that the doom of an exclusively pecuniary-profit industry would fol­low.’41 A few years later, denouncing ‘control by the few o f access to means o f productive labor on the part o f m any’ , and noting ‘the existence of class conflicts, amounting at times to veiled civil w ar’ , he argued that liberalism should go beyond the provision of social services ‘and socialize the forces o f pro­duction, now at hand, so that the liberty o f individuals will be supported by the very structure o f economic organization’ .42 But ‘the forces o f production’ which were to be socialized were science and technology, which were now perverted from their proper end. This could not be done either by patchwork or by socialist revolution, but only by ‘the method o f cooperative intelligence’ .43 Although he referred more than once to the desirability o f ‘a socialized econom y’ ,44 it is not at all clear what he had in mind. H e was not interested in any analysis o f

39 Liberalism and Social Action (1935), New York, 1963, p. 81; cf. Public and Its Problems, p. 202.

40 Public and Its Problems, p. 208.41 Individualism O ld and New (1929), New York, 1962, pp. 117-18.42 Liberalism and Social Action, pp. 38, 80, 88.43 Ibid., p. 8144 Ibid., pp. 90, 91.

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capitalism. H e was entirely taken up with the prospects o f a dem ocratic liberalism. Acknowledging ‘that our institutions, democratic in form, tend to favor in substance a privileged plutocracy’ , he went on to say:

Nevertheless it is sheer defeatism to assume in advance o f actual trial that dem ocratic political institutions are incapable either o f further developm ent or o f constructive social application. E ven as they now exist, the forms o f representative governm ent are poten­tia lly capable o f expressing the public w ill w hen that assumes an y­thing like unification.45

W hat above all was needed was for liberals to apply to ‘social relations and social direction’ the method o f ‘experimental and cooperative intelligence5 that had already accomplished so much ‘in subduing to potential human use the energies of physical nature’ .46

Dewey, then, while far from relying on the existing demo­cratic political m achinery to bring about the desired trans­formation o f society, appealed from democratic machinery to democratic humanism. Dem ocracy ‘is a w ay o f life’ : it ‘cannot now depend upon or be expressed in political institutions alone’ .47 The humanistic view which he saw as the essential of dem ocracy must be infused into ‘every phase o f our culture— science, art, education, morals and religion, as well as politics and economics’ .48 This was to be done prim arily through the spread o f a scientific outlook: ‘the future o f dem ocracy is allied with the spread o f the scientific attitude.’ And it must all be done by ‘plural, partial and experimental methods’.49

The distance between D ew ey’s pragmatism, with its strong early twentieth-century influence in the U nited States, and the pluralist idealism which was so prevalent in English liberal- democratic thinking in the same period, is not great. Both saw a need for ‘plural, partial and experimental methods’ . The English theorists were more inclined to revert to the values o f

45 Ibid., pp. 85-6.46 Ibid., p. 92.47 Freedom and Culture, New York, 1939, pp. 130, 125.48 Ibid., p. 125.49 Ibid., pp. 148, 176.

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ancient Athens, the Americans to the taming o f technology; but both were firm believers in the efficacy o f pluralism.

It is perhaps not unfair to say that all o f them had uncon­sciously accepted the image o f the democratic political process as a market, a free market in which everything would work out to the best advantage of everybody (or to the least disadvan­tage of anybody). They did >not make the market analogy explicitly, because it was too crass, too m aterialistic: they still held to the democratic ideal o f individual self-development, whereas the market analogy implied narrow seeking o f im ­mediate self-interest. T hey did not wish to impute to the citizen the narrow rationality o f market man. But they could and did impute a citizen rationality capable o f overcoming the imper­fections o f the actual democratic system. They were encour­aged to do this because the actual system had survived: M aclver, for instance, could cite the fact o f its survival as evidence that citizens had, in addition to their particular will, a rational general will as citizens, and that the system did allow that will to be expressed.50 W hat the twentieth-century developmental theorists did not see, as we have noticed, was the extent to which the system had survived by reducing the responsiveness o f governments to electorates. It was the developmental theorists’ failure to see this that enabled them to postulate an overriding citizen rationality and build it into their descriptive model. And it was their putting this in their descriptive model that left them wide open to the shattering attack o f the mid-twentieth-century empirical political scien­tists. In the end, it was the failure o f the developmental theorists to see the difference between the actual democratic system which was very much like a market (although far from a fully competitive market), and their idealistic developmental hopes, that led to the .failure o f M odel 2B and its supersession by M odel 3, which w as,an entirely tough, and seemingly realistic, market model.

50 As quoted above, at n. 35.

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Model 3: Equilibrium Democracy

IV

T H E E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L M A R K E T A N A L O G Y

M odel 3, the model which came to prevail in the Western w orld in the middle decades o f the twentieth century, was offered as a replacement for the failed M odel 2. It is, to an extent not always realized, a reversion to and elaboration of M odel 1. T h at is the measure at once o f its congruence with market society and bourgeois man, and o f its increasingly apparent inadequacy.

I have called M odel 3 the equilibrium model. It may equally well be called, as it sometimes is, the pluralist Elitist model. Perhaps the only adequately descriptive name would be one which combined all three terms, ‘the pluralist elitist equilibrium m odel’, for these three characteristics are equally central to it. It is pluralist in that it starts from the assumption that the society which a modern dem ocratic political system must fit is a plural society, that is, a society consisting o f indivi­duals each o f whom is pulled in m any directions by his many interests, now in com pany with one group o f his fellows, now with another. It is Elitist in that it assigns the main role in the political process to self-chosen groups o f leaders. It is an equi­librium model in that it presents the democratic process as a system which maintains an equilibrium between the demand and supply o f political goods.

M odel 3 was first systematically, though briefly, formulated in 1942, by Joseph Schumpeter, in a few chapters o f his in­fluential book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Since then it has been built up and made apparently solid by the work of m any political scientists who have amplified and supported it

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by a substantial amount o f em pirical investigation o f how voters in Western democracies actually behave and how exist­ing Western political systems actually respond to their be­haviour.1

The main stipulations o f this model are, first, that democracy is simply a mechanism for choosing and authorizing govern­ments, not a kind o f society tior a set o f moral ends; and second, that the mechanism consists o f a competition between two or more self-chosen sets o f politicians (elites), arrayed in political parties, for the votes which will entitle them to rule until the next election. The voters’ role is not to decide political issues and then choose representatives who will carry out those decisions: it is rather to choose the men who will do the decid­ing. Thus Schumpeter; ‘the role o f the people is to produce a government . . . the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which indivi­duals acquire the power to decide by means o f a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.’ 2 The individuals who so com­pete are, o f course, the politicians. The citizens’ role is simply to choose between sets of politicians periodically at election time. The citizens’ ability thus to replace one government by another protects them from tyranny. And, to the extent that there is any difference in the platforms o f the parties, or in the general lines o f policy to be expected of each party as a government (on the basis o f its record), the voters in choosing between parties register their desire for one batch of political goods rather than another. The purveyors o f the batch which gets the most votes become the authorized rulers until the next election: they cannot tyrannize because there will be a next election.

M odel 3 deliberately empties out the moral content which M odel 2 had put into the idea o f democracy. There is no non­sense about dem ocracy as a vehicle for the improvement o f

1 Leading works are: Bernard R. Bereison, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee: Voting, Chicago, 1954; Robert A. Dahl: A Preface to Democratic Theory, Chicago, 1956; Dahl: Who Governs?, New Haven, 1961; Dahl: Modern Political Analysis, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba: The Civic Culture, Princeton, 1963.

2Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 2nd edn,, New York and London, 1947, p. 269.

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mankind. Participation is not a value in itself, nor even an instrumental value for the achievement o f a higher, more socially conscious set o f human beings. The purpose o f demo­cracy is to register the desires o f people as they are, not to con­tribute to what they might be or might wish to be. Democracy is simply a market mechanism: the voters are the consumers; the politicians are the entrepreneurs. It is not surprising that the man who first proposed this model was an economist who had worked all his professional life with market models. Nor is it surprising that the political theorists (and then the publicists and the public) took up this model as a realistic one, for they also have lived and worked in a society permeated by market behaviour. Not only did the market model seem to correspond to, and hence to explain, the actual political behaviour o f the main component parts o f the political system— the voters and the parties; it also seemed to justify that behaviour, and hence the whole system.

For in the mid-twentieth century, when it still did not seem too naive to talk about consumers’ sovereignty in the economic market, it was easy to see a parallel in the political market: the political consumers were sovereign because they had a choice between the purveyors o f packages o f political goods. It was easy for the political theorists to make the same assumptions as the economic theorists. In the economic model, entrepreneurs and consumers were assumed to be rational maximizers of their own good, and to be operating in conditions o f free com­petition in which all energies and resources were brought to the market, with the result that the market produced the optimum distribution o f labour and capital and consumer goods. So in the political model, politicians and voters were assumed to be rational maximizers, and to be operating in conditions o f free political competition, with the result that the market-like political system produced the optimum distribu­tion o f political energies and political goods. The democratic political market produced an optimum equilibrium o f inputs and outputs— o f the energies and resources people would put into it and the rewards they would get out o f it. I have pointed out elsewhere3 that by the time the political scientists had

3 Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, Oxford, 1973, Essay X.

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taken over this economic model it was already being discarded or m uch modified by economists in favour o f an oligopolistic power-bloc model o f the economy. But the notion o f con­sumers’ sovereignty is still accepted in the pluralist political model, and serves as an im plicit justification o f it.

This model makes another market assumption. Not only does it assume that political man, like economic man, is essen­tially a consumer and an appropriator: it assumes also that the things different people want out o f the government— the demands for political goods— are so diverse and shifting that the only w ay o f making them effective, the only way o f getting the governm ent’s decisions to meet them, the only w ay of eliciting the required supply o f political goods and getting it distributed in proportion to the myriad demands, is an entre­preneurial system like that which operates in the standard model o f the competitive market economy. Given that the political demands are so diverse that no natural or spontaneous grouping o f them could be expected to produce a clear m ajority position, and given that in a dem ocracy the govern­ment should express the will o f the m ajority, it follows that a device is needed which will produce a m ajority will out o f those diverse demands, or will produce the set o f decisions most agreeable to, or least disagreeable to, the whole lot of diverse individual demands. A system o f entrepreneurial politi­cal parties offering differently proportioned packages o f politi­cal goods, o f which the voters by m ajority vote choose one, is offered as the best, or the only, device for doing this: it produces a stable government which equilibrates demand and supply.

This pluralism o f M odel 3 evidently has something in com­mon with the pluralism .we have seen in M odel 2B. But there is a considerable qualitative difference. The pluralism of M odel 3 leaves out the ethical component that was so prominent in M odel 2B. It treats citizens as simply political consumers, and political society as simply a market-like relation between them and the suppliers o f political commodities.

From this summary account o f M odel 3 and the assumptions on which it is based, we can see that it offers itself as a state­ment o f what the prevailing system actually is and as an ex­planation, in terms o f market principles, o f why it works as

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Model 3: Equilibrium Democracy 81

well as it does. W e have noticed also that the explanation easily merges into justification. Before we look more closely at the adequacy o f M odel 3, as description, explanation, and justification, we should notice that there are differences of emphasis, i f not o f substance, between some of its leading exponents.

T he differences are not so much in the descriptions they give as in the extent of the claims made for the system. T hey all see the citizens as political consumers, with very diverse wants and demands. They all see competition between politicians for the citizens’ votes as the motor o f the system. T h ey all find that this mechanism does produce a stable equilibrium. T h ey differ somewhat in their views o f the extent to which it also provides some measure o f political consumers’ sovereignty. Schumpeter gives the system a rather low rating on this. He finds that the voters have most o f their choices made for them ,4 and that the pressures they can bring to bear on the government between election times are not very effective.

O ther analysts are more optimistic about the effectiveness of consumers’ preferences. Dahl finds ‘somewhat defective’ in Schum peter’s ‘otherwise excellent analysis’ the view ‘that elec­tions and interelection activity are o f trivial importance in determining policy’ . But the most Dahl claims for these activi­ties is that ‘ they are crucial processes for insuring that political leaders will be somewhat responsive to the preferences o f some ordinary citizens’ ;5 or that ‘W ith all its defects, [the Am erican political system] does nonetheless provide a high probability that any active and legitim ate group will make itself heard effectively at some stage in the process o f decision . . . it appears to be a relatively efficient system for reinforcing agreement, encouraging moderation, and maintaining social peace in a restless and immoderate people operating a gigantic, powerful, diversified, and incredibly complex society.’6 In a later work D ahl rates the responsiveness o f the system a little higher: ‘most citizens . . . possess a moderate degree o f indirect influ­ence, for elected officials keep the real or im agined preferences

4 See below, at nn. 23 and 24.5 Preface to Democratic Theory, p. 131.6 Ibid., pp. 150-1.

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of constituents constantly in mind in deciding what policies to adopt or reject.’7

Still higher claims are sometimes made. For instance, the influential study Voting, by Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, after demonstrating that in the Am erican political system the citizens are not at all like the rational citizens o f M odel 2, and pointing out that nevertheless the system does work (that is, has not disintegrated into either dictatorship or civil war), and ‘often works with distinction’,8 concluded that it must have hidden merit. Something like the invisible hand celebrated by Adam Sm ith must be at work.

I f the dem ocratic system depended solely on the qualifications o f the individual voter, then it seems rem arkable that dem ocracy has survived through the centuries. A fter exam ining the detailed data on how individuals m isperceive political reality, or respond to irrel­evant social influences, one wonders how a dem ocracy ever solves its political problem s. But w hen one considers the data in a broader perspective— how huge sections o f the society adapt to political conditions affecting them or how the political system adjusts itself to chan gin g conditions over long periods o f tim e— he cannot fail to be impressed w ith the total results. W here the rational citizen seems to abdicate, nevertheless angels seem to tread.9

This echo of Adam Smith is not surprising, for Berelson et al. do tend to attribute the success of M odel 3 to its market-ltke n atu re: nothing less than the magic o f the market can explain the success o f the system, and nothing more is needed to justify it,

T H E A D E Q U A C Y OF M O D E L 3

W e have noticed that M odel 3 presents itself as description, as explanation, and sometimes as justification, o f the actual political system in Western democracies. In asking now how adequate the model is on each count we must acknowledge that there is some difficulty in treating the three counts separ­ately, since they often merge into each other. Things m ay be left out o f the descriptions because an explanatory framework

7 Who Governs?, p. 164.8 Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee: Voting, p. 312.s Ibid., p. 311.

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already adopted treats them as o f little or no importance. O r empirical descriptive findings about, for instance, citizens’ apathy or voters’ misinformation, m ay require the theorists to cast about for a principle o f explanation to account for the fact that the system works at all. And principles o f explanation, as we have seen, easily shade into justifications. O ne m ay still usefully separate the descriptive from the justificatory aspect, without hoping to treat the explanatory aspect entirely separ­ately.

(i) Descriptive adequacyAs description o f the actual system now prevailing in

W estern liberal-democratic nations, M odel 3 must be ad­judged substantially accurate. It is clearly a much more realis­tic statement than any provided by M odel 2. It has been built up by careful and extensive empirical investigations by highly competent scholars. There is no reason to doubt their findings, which depart so drastically from M odel 2. T h ey m ay have left some things out o f account, for instance the ability o f the elites to decide what issues m ay be put to the voters at all and what are non-issues,10 but such omissions may be thought to affect the m odel’s explanatory or justificatory adequacy more than its descriptive adequacy.

Some adjustment m ay be needed to make their findings, which are pre-eminently based on researches into the system in the United States, applicable to Western Europe: the cur­rent strength o f the Communist Party in France and Italy, for instance, suggests that in those countries party divisions are more polarized along class lines than the Am erican pluralistic model allows for. But that can probably be accommodated without much difficulty. T h e substantial accuracy of M odel 3 as description m ay be attributed to the substantial accuracy of its assumptions about current Western man and society: as long as we have market man and market society, they can be expec­ted to operate as described in M odel 3.

10 As argued by Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz: ‘Two Faces of Power’, American Political Science Review, L V I, 4 (December J962); reprinted in Charles A. M cCoy and John Playford (eds.): Apolitical Politics, a Critique o f Behavioralism, New York, 1967.

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(ii) Explanatory adequacyExplanatory principles, intended to show why the system

works at all or works as well as it does, grow out o f (and grow into) the descriptive findings. But they also merge so generally into justifications o f the system that it w ill be convenient to consider explanatory and justificatory adequacy together. In­deed, most o f the recent writing criticizing M odel 3 seems to have begun from dissatisfaction with its justificatory claims and gone on to challenge its explanatory or even its descriptive adequacy. I shall not attempt to summarize all the critical analyses o f M odel 3 that have been m ade in the last decade or so by political scientists o f what m ay be called a radical liberal-democratic persuasion,11 but simply cite their work as evidence o f increasing dissatisfaction with the model among the political science community. I shall then go on to inquire, in the light o f the analysis already made of the failure o f M odels 1 and 2, why M odel 3 has begun to appear so unsatis­factory.

(iii) Justificatory adequacyIt m ay be well to begin by considering the claim generally

made or implied by exponents o f M odel 3 that their model is not justificatory at all, but only descriptive and explanatory. This claim really cannot be accepted, although Schumpeter, who scarcely bothered to make such a claim, m ight be justified in making it. But the later and more substantial exponents of M odel 3 all imply, or even state, a justification at one or both o f two levels. T hey are saying, at the least, that the system is, with all its admitted imperfections, the only one that can do the job, or the one that can do it best. They are the realists. T h at is what people are like, so this is the best they are capable of. Generally, even more is claimed— that the system produces optimum equilibrium and some measure o f citizen consumers’ sovereignty. These are taken to be self-evidently good, so the

11 e.g. Peter Bachxach: The Theory o f Democratic Elitism , a Critique, Boston and Toronto, 1967; M cCoy and Playford, op. cit.; William Connolly (ed.): The Bias o f Pluralism, New York, 1969; Henry Kariel (ed.): Frontiers o f Democratic Theory, New York, 1970; Carole Pateman: Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge, 1970.

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system which provides them is taken to be justified by the very demonstration that it does provide them. Both o f the realists* claims are thus, at least im plicitly, justificatory. How adequate are they?

The first claim amounts to saying that M odel 3 is best be­cause anything loftier is unworkable. The advocates o f M odel 3 contrast it with what they usually call the ‘classical’ model of democracy, which generally turns out to be a confused mix­ture o f a pre-industrial model (Rousseau’s or Jefferson’s), and our M odels 1 and 2. It would take too long a digression to try to sort out those confusions,12 especially as different pro­ponents o f M odel 3 set up their ‘classical’ straw men rather differently. Schumpeter, for instance, makes his main target the over-rationalistic assumptions he finds in Rousseau and in Bentham ’s M odel 1: average men, he holds, are not capable o f forming the rational judgem ents he thinks required by those models; therefore those models are hopeless.13 Others have been more concerned to deflate the moral pretensions of M odel 2, while accepting the M odel 1 view of man as essen­tially a rational m axim izing calculator: it is because men are on the whole such m aximizing calculators that most o f them m ay well decide not to spend much time or energy in political participation, thus invalidating M odel 2.14

12 The extent of the confusion has been pointedly remarked by Carole Pateman: ‘the notion of a “ classical theory of democracy” is a myth’ (Participation and Democratic Theory, p. 17).

13 A similar although less extravagant position is taken by Berelson (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee: Voting, p. 322).

14 Gf. Robert Dahl’s argument (After the Revolution ? Authority in a Good Society, New Haven and London, 1970, pp. 40-56) that ‘a reasonable man will* and ‘in actual practice everyone does’ apply, to any system of authori­ty, the ‘Criterion of Economy’, which is to balance the cost of political participation against the expected benefit, the cost being the forgone uses of his time and energy. This notion of participation .as nothing but a ‘cost’ (which it is, if everyone is seen as merely a maximizing consumer) over­looks the possible value of participation in enhancing the participant’s understanding of his own position and in giving him a greater sense of purpose and greater awareness of community. Cf. Bachrach: ‘ Interest, Participation, and Democratic Theory’, in J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (eds.): Participation in Politics (Nomos X V I), New York, 1973, pp. 49-52.

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Both these views as to why M odel 3 is more realistic, more workable, and so ‘better5, than any previous model, rest ulti­m ately on an unverifiable assumption that the political capa­bilities o f the average person in a modern market society are a fixed datum, or at least are unlikely to change in our time.

One might argue, against the validity o f that assumption, that it depends on a model o f man which came to prevail only with the emergence or predominance o f the capitalist market society.15 But even if it is granted that that model o f man is so time-bound and culture-bound, we do not know whether or when it m ay be superseded. So, although the assumption can­not be verified, neither can it be absolutely falsified. Hence the justificatory adequacy of the first claim must be left undecided: we can only return the Scottish verdict ‘Not Proven’.

W hat o f the second c la im : that, on the analogy o f the market in the economic system, the competitive elite party system brings about an optimum equilibrium o f the supply and de­mand for political goods, and provides some measure o f citizen consumer sovereignty? Prima facie, optimum equilibrium and citizen consumer sovereignty are good in themselves. T o most people who live in advanced and relatively stable societies, ‘equilibrium ’ sounds better than ‘disequilibrium’ ; and ‘opti­m um ’ is by definition best; so what could be better than ‘optimum equilibrium ’ ? And ‘citizen consumer sovereignty’ is a phrase loaded with good words. So i f M odel 3 does provide these, surely we might conclude that it is a pretty good kind o f democracy. But this does not follow. All that follows is that it is a pretty good kind o f a market. But a market is not neces­sarily democratic.

I want now to show that the M odel 3 political market sys­tem is not nearly as dem ocratic as it is made out to b e : that the equilibrium it produces is an equilibrium in inequality; that the consumer sovereignty it claims to provide is to a large extent an illusion; and that, to the extent that the consumer sovereignty is real, it is a contradiction o f the central demo­cratic tenet o f equality o f individual entitlement to the use and enjoyment o f one’s capacities. The claims for optimum equi-

15 Cf. Kari Polanyi: The Great Transformation, New York, 1944, and my Democratic Theory, Essay I.

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librium and consumer sovereignty are virtually the same claim — two sides o f the same coin— and so m ay be treated together as a single claim.

The claim fails on two counts. First, in so far as the political market system, on the analogy o f the economic market, is competitive enough to produce the optimum supply and distribution o f political goods, optimum in relation to the de­mands, what it does is to register and respond to what econo­mists call the effective demand, that is, the demands that have purchasing power to back them. In the economic market this means simply money, no m atter whether the money has been acquired by an output o f its possessors’ energy or in some other way. In the political market the purchasing power is to a large extent, but not entirely, money— the money needed to support a party or a candidate in an election campaign, to organize a pressure group, or to buy space or time in the mass media (or to own some o f the mass media). But political purchasing power includes also direct expenditure o f energy in cam paign­ing, organizing, and participating in other ways in the political process.

In so far as the political purchasing power is money, we can scarcely say that the equilibrating process is democratic in any society, like ours, in which there is substantial inequality of wealth and o f chances o f acquiring wealth. W e may still call it consumer sovereignty if we wish. But the sovereignty o f an aggregate o f such unequal consumers is not evidently demo­cratic.

In so far as the political purchasing power is direct expendi­ture o f energy the case seems better. W hat could be fairer than a return proportional to the input o f political energy? Citizens who are apathetic should surely not expect as much return as those who are more active. This would be a fair principle, con­sistent with democratic equality, i f the apathy were an in­dependent datum, that is, i f the apathy were in each case the outcome o f a m aximizing decision by the individual, balancing the most profitable uses o f his time and energy as between political participation and other things, and i f every individual could expect that each hour he gave to politics would have the same value, the same purchasing power in the political market,

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as any other person’s. But this is just what it cannot have. Those whose education and occupation make it more difficult for them than for the others to acquire and marshal and weigh the information needed for effective participation are clearly at a disadvantage: an hour o f tl^eir time devoted to political participation w ill not have as much effect as an hour o f one o f the others. T h ey know this, hpnce they are apathetic. Social inequality thus creates political apathy. A pathy is not an independent datum.

O ver and above this, the political system o f M odel 3 contri­butes directly to apathy. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the functions which a party system in an unequal society with mass franchise must perform require a blurring o f issues and a diminution o f the responsibility o f governments to electorates, both o f which reduce the incentive o f the voters to exert them­selves in making a choice. A frequent reason for non-voting is the feeling that there is no real choice.

Proponents o f M odel 3 have made much o f the phenomenon o f voter apathy, though they have not usually traced it to the causes I have just mentioned. T hey do, however, often point out that successful operation o f M odel 3 requires something like the present levels o f ap ath y: greater participation would en­danger the stability o f the system.16 The accuracy o f this general proposition is never demonstrated, but the fact that it is asserted at all is revealing: in the realism of M odel 3, some good is to be found even in something as unpromising as widespread apathy. W e m ay prefer to think that a political system which requires and encourages apathy is not doing a very brisk job o f optimizing, especially in view o f the class differential in apathy.17

T o sum up, then, on the first count, we find that in so far as

16 e.g. Berelson et a l.: Voting, ch. 14; W. H. Morris-Jones: ‘In Defence of Apathy’, Political Studies II {1954), pp. 25-37; Seymour Martin Lipset: Political M an, New York, i960, pp. 14-16; Lester W. Milbrath: Political Participation, Chicago, 1965, ch. 6.

17 That there is a class differential in political participation is the un­animous conclusion of voting studies. For a thorough exploration of this and other dimensions of apathy, see Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie: Participation in America, Political Democracy and Social Equality, New York, 1972.

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the political market system is competitive enough to do the job o f equilibrating the supply o f and demand for political goods— in so far, that is, as it does actually respond to consumer de­mands— it measures and responds to demands which are very unequally effective. Some demands are more effective than others because, where the demand is expressed in human energy input, one person’s energy input cannot get the same return per unit as another person’s. And the class o f political demands that have the most money to back them is largely the same as the class o f those that have the larger pay-off per unit o f human energy input. In both cases it is the demands o f the higher socio-economic classes which are the most effective. So the lower classes are apathetic. In short, the equilibrium and the consumer sovereignty, in so far as M odel 3 does provide them, are far from dem ocratic.18

The second count on which the claim to provide a demo­cratic consumer sovereignty fails is simply that M odel 3 does not provide a significant amount o f consumer sovereignty. The M odel 3 political market is far from fully competitive. For it is, to use an economists’ term, oligopolistic. T h at is, there are only a few sellers, a few suppliers o f political goods, in other words only a few political parties: in the most favoured variant of M odel 3 there are only two effective parties, with a possibility of one or two more. W here there are so few sellers, they need not and do not respond to the buyers’ demands as they must do in a fully competitive system. T h ey can set prices and set the range o f goods that will be offered. M ore than that, they can, to a con­siderable extent, create the demand. In an oligopolistic market, the demand is not autonomous, not an independent datum.

This effect o f oligopoly, which is a commonplace o f econo­mic theory, has been surprisingly little noticed by the political theorists o f M odel 3. Even Schumpeter, who o f all the formu- lators o f M odel 3 has economic parallels most in mind, and who makes quite a point o f the way that oligopoly and imper­fect competition require a substantial revision o f the classical

18 Dahl, who has explored the implications of Model 3 more fully than most of its exponents, particularly in his After the Revolution (1970), is there explicit about the distorting effect of class inequality and sees its reduction as a prerequisite of genuine democracy.

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can provide affluence indefinitely), and as long as we continue to accept the cold-war view that the only alternative to M odel3 is a wholly non-liberal totalitarian state. Putting this in a slightly different w ay, we might say that a system o f competing Elites with a low level o f citizen participation is required in an unequal society, most o f whose members think o f themselves as m aximizing consumers.

This requirem ent took on a new urgency with the cata­strophic economic depression o f the early 1930s in all the Western nations. The need for the state to intervene in the economy along Keynesian lines, in order to sustain the capital­ist order, meant an increased need to remove political decisions from any dem ocratic responsiveness: only the experts, whose reasoning was assumed to be beyond the comprehension o f the voters, could save the system. The experts’ advice was followed, and it did save the system for the next three or four decades. M odel 3 was, therefore, from its very beginnings in the 1940s, understandably aligned against democratic participation. But with increasing disillusionment with the results o f this state- regulated capitalism in the 1960s and 70$, the adequacy of M odel 3 is increasingly questioned.

The fact that doubts are increasingly being raised about the adequacy of this system cannot, unfortunately, be taken as evidence that we have moved far enough away from in­equality, and from the consciousness o f ourselves as essentially consumers, to make a new political model possible. The most we can do is to look at the problems o f m oving to a new model, and examine possible solutions.

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Model 4: Participatory Democracy

V

T H E RISE OF T H E I D E A

T o call participatory dem ocracy a model at all, let alone a model o f liberal democracy, is perhaps to yield too much to a liking for symmetry. Participatory dem ocracy is certainly not a model as solid or specific as those we have been examining. It began as a slogan o f the New Left student movements o f the 1960s. It spread into the working class in the 1960s and ’70s, no doubt as an offshoot o f the growing job-dissatisfaction among both blue- and white-collar workers and the more widespread feeling o f alienation, which then became such fashionable sub­jects for sociologists, m anagem ent experts, government com­missions o f inquiry, and popular journalists. One manifestation of this new spirit was the rise o f movements for workers’ control in industry. In the same decades, the idea that there should be substantial citizen participation in government decision-making spread so w idely that national governments began enrolling themselves, at least verbally, under the participatory banner, and some even initiated programmes embodying extensive citizen participation.1 It appears that the hope of a more par­ticipatory society and system o f government has come to stay.

W e need not attempt to review the voluminous recent litera­ture on participation in various spheres o f society. O ur concern

1 e.g. the Community Action Programs inaugurated by the United States federal government in 1964, which called for ‘maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served’. For a critical account of this, see ‘Citizen Participation in Emerging Social Institutions’ by Howard I. Kalodner, in Participation in Politics, as cited in n. 3, below.

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here is only with the prospects o f a more participatory system of government for Western liberal-democratic nations. Can liberal-democratic government be made more participatory, and if so, how? This question has not yet had as m uch attention as it deserves. The debate among political theorists had to be at the beginning m ainly concerned with the prior question: is more citizen participation desirable?2 The exponents o f M odel 3, as we have seen, said no. T h at debate is not yet ended.3

For our purposes, however, that debate m ay be foreclosed. It is sufficient to say that in view o f the unquestioned class differential in political participation in the present system, and assuming that that differential is both the effect and the con­tinuing cause o f the inability o f those in the lower strata either to articulate their wants or to make their demands effective, then nothing as unparticipatory as the apathetic equilibrium o f M odel 3 measures up to the ethical requirements o f demo­cracy. This is not to say that a more participatory system would of itself remove all the inequities o f our society. It is only to say that low participation and social inequity are so bound up with each other that a more equitable and humane society requires a more participatory political system.

The difficult question, whether either a change in the politi­cal system or a change in the society is a prerequisite o f the other, will occupy us largely in the next section o f this chapter. In the meantime I shall assume that something more partici­patory than our present system is desirable. The remaining question is whether it is possible.

IS MO R E P A R T I C I P A T I O N N O W P O S S I B L E ?

(i) The problem of sizeIt is not much use simply celebrating the democratic quality

2 This has been the main concern of the radical liberal critics of Model 3 (as cited in ch. IV, p, 84, n. 11, and in n. 3, below.

3 S e t Participation in Politics (Nomos X V I) (eds. J. R. Pennock a n d j. W. Chapman), New York, 1975. Most of the contributors to this volume, which is based on papers given at the 1971 annual meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, are in favour of more participa­tion, but there is a spirited defence, by M. B, E. Smith, of the opposite position.

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o f life and o f decision-making (that is, o f government) that can be had in contemporary communes or New England town- meetings or that was had in ancient city-states. There may be a lot to learn about the quality o f dem ocracy by examining these face-to-face societies, but that will not show us how a partici­patory dem ocracy could operate in a m odem nation o f twenty million or two hundred million people. It seems clear that, at the national level, there will have to be some kind o f repre­sentative system, not completely direct democracy'.

The idea that recent and expected advances in computer technology and telecommunications will make it possible to achieve direct dem ocracy at the required million-fold level is attractive not only to technologists but also to social theorists and political philosophers.4 But it does not pay enough atten­tion to an inescapable requirement o f any decision-making process: somebody must formulate the questions.

No doubt something could be done with two-way television to draw more people into more active political discussion. And no doubt it is technically feasible to put in every living-room— or, to cover the whole population, beside every bed— a com­puter console with Yes/No buttons, or buttons for Agree/ Disagree/Don’t K now , or for Strongly Approve/M ildly A p ­prove/Don’t Care/M ildly Disapprove/Strongly Disapprove, or for preferential multiple choices. But it seems inevitable that some government body would have to decide what questions would be asked: this could scarcely be left to private bodies.

There might indeed be a provision that some stated number o f citizens have the right to propose questions which must then be put electronically to the whole electorate. But even with such a provision, most o f the questions that would need to be asked in our present complex societies could scarcely be formu­lated by citizen groups specifically enough for the answers to give a government a clear directive. Nor- can the ordinary citizen be expected to respond to the sort o f questions that would be required to give a clear directive. The questions would have to be as intricate as, for instance, ‘what per cent

4 See Michael Rossman: On Learning and Social Change, New York, 1972, pp. 257-8; and Robert Paul Wolff: In Defense o f Anarchism, New York, 1970, pp. 34-7.

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unemployment rate would you accept in order to reduce the rate of inflation by x per cent?’, or ‘what increase in the rate of(a) income tax, (b) sales and excise taxes, (c) other taxes (specify which)-* would you accept in order to increase by blank per cent (fill in [punch in] the blank), the level o f (1) old-age pensions, (2) health services, (3) other social services (specify which), (4) any other benefits (specify w hich)?’ Thus even if there were provision for such a scheme o f popular initiative, governments would still have to make a lot o f the real decisions.

M oreover, unless there were, somewhere in the system, a body whose duty was to reconcile inconsistent demands pre­sented by the buttons, the system would soon break down. I f such a system were to be attempted in anything like our pres­ent society there would almost certainly be inconsistent de­mands. People— the same people— would, for instance, very likely demand a reduction o f unemployment at the same time as they were demanding a reduction o f inflation, or an increase in government expenditures along with a decrease in taxes. And of course different people— people with opposed interests, such as the presently privileged and the unprivileged— would also present incom patible dem ands.The computer could easily deal with the latter incompatibilities by ascertaining the majority position, but it could not sort out the former. T o avoid the need for a body to adjust such incompatible demands to each other the questions would have to be framed in a way that would require o f each voter a degree o f sophistication impossible to expect. >

Nor would the situation be any better in any foreseeable future society. It is true that the sort o f questions just men­tioned, which are about the distribution o f economic costs and economic benefits among different sections o f the population, m ay be expected to become less acute in the measure that material scarcity becomes less pressing. But even if they were to disappear as internal problems in the econom ically most advanced societies, they would reappear there as external problem s: for instance, how much and what kind o f aid should the advanced countries afford to the underdeveloped ones? M oreover, another range o f questions would arise internally,

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having to do not with distribution but with production in the broadest sense, that is, with the uses to be made of the society’s whole stock o f energy and resources, and the encouragement or discouragement o f further economic growth and population growth. And beyond that there would be such questions as the extent to which the society should promote or should keep its hands o ff the cultural and educational pursuits o f the people.

Such questions, even in the most favourable circumstances im aginable, will require repeated reformulation. A nd ques­tions o f this sort do not readily lend themselves to formulation by popular initiative. Their formulation would have to be entrusted to a. governm ental body.

It might still be argued that even if it is impossible to leave the formulation o f all policy questions to popular initiative, at least the very broadest sort o f policy could be left to it. Granted that the many hundreds o f policy decisions that are now made every year by governments and legislatures would still have to be made by them, it m ight be urged that those decisions should be required to conform to the results o f referenda on the very broadest questions. But it is difficult to see how most o f the broadest questions could be left to formulation by popular initiative. Popular initiative could certainly formulate clear questions on certain single issues, for instance, capital punish­ment or legalization of m arijuana or o f abortion on demandpr: • issues on which the response required is simply yes or no. But for the reasons given above, popular initiative could not formu~ late adegu^ite questions on the great interrelated issues o f over­all social and economic policy. T h at would have to be left to some organ o f government. A nd unless that organ were either an elected body or responsible to an elected body, and thus at some remove responsible to the electorate, such a system of continual referenda would not really be dem ocratic: worse, by giving the appearance o f being democratic, the system would conceal the real location o f power and would thus enable ‘dem ocratic5 governments to be more autocratic than they are now. W e cannot do without elected politicians. W e must rely, though we need not rely exclusively, on indirect democracy. The problem is to make the elected politicians responsible. The

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e le c tro n ic co n so le b eside e v e ry b e d c a n n o t d o th a t. E le ctro n ic te ch n o lo g y , th e n , c a n n o t g iv e us d ire c t d e m o c ra c y .

So the problem o f participatory dem ocracy on a mass scale seems intractable. It is intractable if we simply try. to draw mechanical blue-prints o f the proposed political system with­out paying attention to the changes in society, and in people’s consciousness o f themselves, which a little thought will show must precede or accom pany the attainment o f anything like participatory democracy. I want to suggest now that the cen­tral problem is not how a participatory dem ocracy would operate but how we could move towards it.

(ii) A vicious circle and possible loopholesI begin with a general proposition: the. main problem about

participatory dem ocracy is not how to run it but how to reach it. For it seems likely that i f we can reach it, or reach any sub­stantial instalment o f it, our w ay along the road to reaching it will have made us capable o f running it, or at least less incap­able than we now are.

H aving announced this proposition, I must imm ediately qualify it. The failures so far to reach really participatory dem ocracy in countries where that has been a conscious goal, for instance Czechoslovakia in the years up to 1968 and many of the Third W orld countries, demand some reservations about such a proposition. For in both those cases, a good deal o f the road had already been travelled: I mean the road away from capitalist class-division and bourgeois ideology towards, in the one case, a M arxist humanism and, in the other, a Rousseauan concept o f a society em bodying a general will, and in both cases towards a stronger sense o f community than we have. And, o f course, the whole o f the road had there been travelled aw ay from that mirror-image o f the oligopolistic capitalist market system: I mean, the oligopolistic competition o f politi­cal parties which prevails with us, which is not only not very participatory, but is recommended, by most current liberal- democratic theorists, as quintessentially non-participatory.

So there still are difficulties in reaching participatory demo­cracy, even when much o f the road has been travelled, i.e. when some o f the obvious prerequisite changes in society and

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Model 4: Participatory Democracy 99

ideology have taken place. However, the roads they have travelled in such countries as I have just mentioned are signifi­cantly different from the road we would have to travel to come near to participatory democracy. For I assume that our road in the Western liberal democracies is not likely to be via com­munist revolution; nor, obviously, w ill it be via revolutions of national independence beset by all the problems o f under­development and low productivity that have faced the Third W orld countries.

It therefore seems worth inquiring w hat road it m ay be possible for any o f the Western liberal democracies to travel, and whether, or to what extent, m oving along that road could make us capable o f operating a system substantially more participatory than our present one. This becomes the question: what roadblocks have to be removed, i.e. what changes in our present society and the now prevailing ideology are pre­requisite or co-requisite conditions for reaching a participatory dem ocracy?

I f my earlier analysis is at all valid, the present non- participatory or scarcely participatory political system of M odel 3 does fit an unequal society o f conflicting consumers and appropriators: indeed, nothing but that system, with its competing political elites and voter apathy, seems competent to hold such a society together. I f that is so, two pre­requisites for the emergence of a M odel 4 are fairly clearly indicated.

O ne is a change in people’s consciousness (or unconscious­ness), from seeing themselves and acting as essentially con­sumers to seeing themselves and acting as exerters and enjoyers o f the exertion and development o f their own capacities. This is requisite not only to the emergence but also to the operation o f a participatory democracy. For the latter self-image brings with it a sense o f community which the former does not. One can acquire and consume by oneself, for one’s own satisfaction or to show one’s superiority to others: this does not require or foster a sense o f comm unity; whereas the enjoyment and development o f one’s capacities is to be done for the most part in conjunction with others, in some relation of community. And it wjill not be doubted that the operation o f a participatory

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democracy would require a stronger sense o f community than now prevails.

The other prerequisite is a great reduction o f the present social and economic inequality, since that inequality, as I have argued, requires a non-participatory party system to hold the society together. And as long as inequality is accepted, the non- participatory political system is likely also to be accepted by all those in all classes who prefer stability to the prospect o f com­plete social breakdown.

Now if these two changes in society— the replacement o f the image o f man as consumer, and a great reduction o f social and economic inequality— are prerequisites o f participatory demo­cracy, we seem to be caught in a vicious circle. For it is un­likely that either o f these prerequisite changes could be effected without a great deal more democratic participation than there is now. The reduction o f social and economic inequality is unlikely without strong dem ocratic action. And it would seem, whether we follow M ill or M arx, that only through actual involvement in jo in t political action can people transcend their consciousness o f themselves as consumers and appropria- tors. Hence the vicious circle: we cannot achieve more demo­cratic participation without a prior change in social inequality and in consciousness, but we cannot achieve the changes in social inequality and consciousness without a prior increase in democratic participation.

Is there any w ay out? I think there m ay be, though in our affluent capitalist societies it is unlikely to follow the pattern proposed or expected in the nineteenth century either by M arx or by M ill. M arx expected the development o f capitalism to lead to a sharpening of class consciousness, which would lead to various kinds o f working-class political action, which would further increase the class consciousness o f the working class and turn it into revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary organization. This would be followed by a revolutionary take­over o f power by the working class, which power would be consolidated by a period of ‘dictatorship o f the proletariat’, w hich would break down the social and economic inequality and replace m an as m axim izing consumer by m an as exerter and developer o f his hum an capacities. W hatever we m ay

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think o f the probability o f this sequence once it had started, it does require increasing class consciousness to start it, and there is little evidence o f this in prosperous Western societies today, where it has generally declined since M arx’s d ay .5

John Stuart M ill’s w ay out does not seem very hopeful either. He counted on two things. First, the broadening o f the franchise would lead to more widespread political participation w hich would in turn make people capable o f still more political participation and would contribute to a change in conscious­ness. Secondly, the owner/worker relation would change with the spread o f producers’ co-ops: to the extent that they re­placed the standard capitalist relation, both consciousness and inequality would be changed. But the broadening o f the fran­chise did not have the result M ill hoped for, nor has the capitalist relation between owner and worker changed in the w ay required.

So neither M arx ’s nor M ill’s w ay seems a w ay out o f our vicious circle. But there is one insight common to both o f them that we m ight well follow. Both assumed that changes in the two factors which abstractly seem to be prerequisites o f each other— the amount o f political participation on the one hand, and the prevailing inequality and the image o f man as infinite consumer and appropriator on the other— would come stage by stage and reciprocally, an incomplete change in one leading to some change in the other, leading to more change in the first, and so on. Even M arx ’s scenario, including as it did revolutionary change at one point, called for this reciprocal incremental change both before and after the revolution. We also m ay surely assume, in looking at our vicious circle, that we needn’t expect one o f the changes to be complete before the other can begin.

So we m ay look for loopholes anywhere in the circle, that is, for changes already visible or in prospect either in the amount o f democratic participation or in social inequality or consumer consciousness. I f we find changes which are not only already perceptible but which are attributable to forces or circum­stances which are likely to go on operating with cumulative

5 There are some signs that class consciousness is re-emerging (see below, p. 106), but not that it is becoming a revolutionary consciousness.

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effect, then we can have some hope o f a break-through. And if the changes are o f a sort that encourages reciprocal changes in the other factors, so much the better.

Are there any loopholes which come up to these specifica­tions? L et us start from the assumption least favourable to our search, the assumption that most o f us are, willy-nilly, m axi­m izing calculators o f our own benefit, making a cost/benefit analysis o f everything, however vaguely we make it; and that most o f us consciously or unconsciously see ourselves as essen­tially infinite consumers. From these assumptions the vicious circle appears to follow directly: most people will support, or not do much to change, a system which produces affluence, which continually increases the Gross National Product, and which also produces political apathy. This makes a pretty strong vicious circle. But there are now some visible loopholes,I shall draw attention to three o f them.

(i ) M ore and more people, in the capacity we have attri­buted to them all, namely as cost/benefit calculators, are recon­sidering the cost/benefit ratio o f our society’s worship o f expansion of the G N P. T hey still see the benefits o f economic growth, but they are now beginning to see some costs they hadn’ t counted before. The most obvious o f these are the costs o f air, water, and earth pollution. These are costs largely in terms o f the quality o f life. Is it too much to suggest that this awareness o f quality is a first step away from being satisfied with quantity, and so a first step away from seeing ourselves as ' infinite consumers, towards valuing our ability to exert our energies and capacities in a decent environment? Perhaps it is too much. But at any rate the growing consciousness o f these costs weakens the unthinking acceptance o f the G N P as the criterion o f social good.

O ther costs o f economic growth, notably the extravagant depletion of natural resources and the likelihood o f irreversible ecological damage, are also increasingly being noticed. A w are­ness o f the costs o f economic growth takes people beyond sheer consumer consciousness. It can be expected to set up some consciousness o f a public interest that is not looked after either by the private interest o f each consumer or by the competition o f political elites.

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(2) There is an increasing awareness o f the costs o f political apathy, and, closely related to this, a growing awareness, with­in the industrial working class, o f the inadequacy o f traditional and routine forms o f industrial action. It is coming to be seen that citizens’ and workers5 non-participation, or low partici­pation, or participation only in routine channels, allows the concentration o f corporate power to dominate our neighbour­hoods, our jobs, our security, and the quality o f life at work and at home. T w o examples o f this new awareness may be given.

(a) The one that is most evident, at least in North American cities, which have hitherto been notoriously careless o f human values, is the rise o f neighbourhood and community move­ments and associations formed to exert pressure to preserve or enhance those values against the operations o f what m ay be called the urban commercial-political complex. Such move­ments have sprung up, with substantial effect, against express­ways, against property developers, against inner-city decay, for better schools and day-care centres in the inner city, and so on. It is true that they have generally begun as, and some­times remained, single-issue affairs. A nd they do not usually seek to replace, but only to put new pressures on, the formal m unicipal political structure.6 M ost o f them do not, therefore, by themselves constitute a significant breakaway from the system of competing elites. But they do attract to active political participation many, especially o f the lower socio­economic strata, who had previously been most politically apathetic.

(b) Less noticeable, but probably in the long run more important, are the movements for democratic participation in decision-making at the workplace.These movements have not yet made decisive strides in any o f the capitalist democracies, but pressure for some degrees o f workers1 control at the shop- floor level and even at the level o f the firm is increasing, and

6 Sometimes they do seek to revise the formal structure, as in the demands for community control of schools or police and for greater community participation in city planning and intelligence operations, as mentioned by John Ladd: ‘The Ethics of Participation’, in J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman, op. cit., pp. 99, 102.

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examples o f it actually in operation are promising.7 The im ­portance o f this, whether the decisions are only about working conditions and planning the way the work is to be arranged at the shop-floor level, or whether it goes as far as participation in policy decisions at the level o f the firm, is twofold.

In the first place, those who are involved in it are getting experience o f participation in decision-making in that side of their lives— their lives at work— where their concern is greater, or at least more imm ediately and directly felt, than in any other. T hey can see at first hand just how far their participa­tion is effective. The forces which make for the apathy o f the ordinary person in the formal political process o f a whole nation are absent. Unconcern about the outcome o f apparently far-off political issues; distance from the results, i f any, o f participation; uncertainty about or disbelief in the effective­ness o f their participation; lack o f confidence in their own ability to participate— none o f these apply to participation in decisions at the workplace. A nd an appetite for participation, based on the very experience o f it, m ay well carry over from the workplace to wider political areas. Those who have proved their competence in the one kind o f participation, and gained confidence there that they can be effective, will be less put off by the forces which have kept them politically apathetic, more able to reason at a greater political distance from results, and more able to see the importance o f decisions at several removes from their most imm ediate concerns.

In the second place, those involved in workers’ control are participating as producers, not as consumers or appropriators.

7 An effective analysis of these is given by Carole Pateman: Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge, 1970, chs. 3 and 4. Other analysts, writing as political activists who want workers’ control as a path to a fully socialist society, find the present achievement of the workers’ control movements less encouraging, e.g. Gerry Hunnius, G. D. Garson, and John Case (eds.): Workers' Control, a Reader on Labor and Social Change, New York, 1973; and Ken Coates and Tony Topham (eds.) : Workers' Control, a book o f readings and witnesses fo r workers' control, London, 1970. The pressure for workers’ control is Jikely to increase since it flows from the increasing, degradation of work which seems inherent in capitalist production: cf. Harry Braverman: Labour and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation o f Work in the Twentieth Century, New York and London, 1974.

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T h ey are in it not to get a higher wage or a greater share o f the product, but to make their productive work more meaningful to them. I f workers’ control were merely another move in the scramble for more pay to take home, or in the continuing effort to m aintain real wages by getting increased money wages and fringe benefits, which is what much trade union activity is about, it would do nothing, just as established trade union practice does nothing, to move men away from their image o f themselves as consumers and appropriators. But workers’ control is not prim arily about distribution o f incom e: it is about the conditions o f production, and as such it can be expected to have a considerable breakaway effect.

(3) There is a growing doubt about the ability o f corporate capitalism, however m uch aided and managed by the liberal state, to meet consumer expectations in the old way, i.e. with the present degree o f inequality. There is a real basis for this doubt: the basis is the existence o f a contradiction w ithin capitalism, the results o f which cannot be indefinitely avoided.

Capitalism reproduces inequality and consumer conscious­ness, and must do so to go on operating. But its increasing ability to produce goods and leisure has as its obverse its in­creasing need to spread them more widely. I f people can’ t buy the goods, no profit can be made by producing them. This dilemma can be staved o ff for quite a time by keeping up cold war and colonial w ars: as long as the public will support these, then the public is, as consumers, buying by proxy all that can be profitably produced, and is wasting it satisfactorily. This has been going on for a long time now, but there is at least a prospect that it will not be indefinitely supported as normal. I f it is not supported, then the system w ill either have to spread real goods more widely, which will reduce social inequality; or it will break down, and so be unable to continue to repro­duce inequality and consumer consciousness.

This dilemma o f capitalism is much more intense now than it was in the nineteenth century, when capitalism had the big safety-valves o f continental and colonial expansion. The dilemma, in conjunction with the changing public awareness o f the cost/benefit ratio o f the system, puts capitalism in a

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rather different position from the one it enjoyed in M ill’s and M arx’s day.

Capitalism in each o f the Western nations in the 1970s is experiencing economic difficulties o f near-crisis proportions. O f these no end is in sight. Keynesian remedies, successful for three decades from the 1930s, have now evidently failed to cope with the underlying contradiction. The most obvious symptom o f this failure is the prevalence, simultaneously, of high rates both o f inflation and o f unemployment— two things which used to be thought alternatives. For wage-earners, the erosion o f the value o f money earnings along with insecurity of employment is a serious matter. It has already led to increased working-class m ilitancy in various forms; in some countries, increased political activity and strength o f communist and socialist parties; in others, increased participation in trade union and industrial activity. The trade unions w ill be increas­ingly impelled not just to concern themselves with labour’s share o f the national income but to recognize the structural incompetence of managed capitalism. It cannot be said that trade union leaders generally have yet seen this, but they are being increasingly hard-pressed by shop steward activity and unofficial strike action. It is to be expected that working-class participation in political and industrial action will increase, and will be increasingly class-conscious. The probability is that industrial action, of which there is a lot already, will be seen to be fundam entally political, and so, whether it takes the form of participation in the formal political process or not, will amount to increased political participation.

So we have three weak points in the vicious circle— the in­creasing awareness o f the costs o f economic growth, the increas­ing awareness o f the costs o f political apathy, the increasing doubts about the ability o f corporate capitalism to meet con­sumer expectations while reproducing inequality. A nd each o f these may be said to be contributing, in ways we have seen, to the possible attainment o f the prerequisite conditions for participatory dem ocracy: together, they conduce to a decline in consumer consciousness, a reduction o f class inequality, and an increase in present political participation. The prospects for a more democratic society are thus not entirely bleak. The

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move towards it will both require and encourage an increasing measure o f participation. And this now seems to be within the realm o f the possible.

Before leaving this discussion o f the possibility o f moving to a participatory democracy, I must emphasize that I have been looking only for possible, even barely possible, ways ahead. I have not attempted to assess whether the chances o f winning through are better or worse than 50/50. And when one thinks o f the forces opposed to such a change, one might hesitate to put the chances as high as 50/50. One need only think o f the power o f multi-national corporations; o f the probability o f the increasing penetration into home affairs o f secret intelligence agencies such as the Am erican C .I.A ., which have been al­lowed or required by their governments to include in ‘intel­ligence’ such activities as organizing invasions o f some smaller countries and assisting in the overthrow of disliked govern­ments o f others; and o f the increasing use o f political terrorism by outraged minorities o f right and left, with the excuse they give governments o f moving into the practices o f the police state, and even getting a large measure o f popular support for the police state. Against such forces can only be put the fact that liberal-democratic governments are reluctant to use open force on a large scale, except for very short periods, against any widely supported popular movements at home: under­standably so, for by the time a government feels the need to do this it m ay well be unable to count on the arm y and the police.

A t a less immediately alarming level there are other factors which m ay prevent the requisite reduction of class inequality. T h e advanced Western economies m ay slow down to a sta­tionary condition (where there is no economic growth because no incentive to new capital formation) before popular pres­sures have done much to get the present class inequalities reduced: this would make further reduction more difficult. And the maintenance o f even the present Western levels of affluence would be impossible i f some o f the underdeveloped nations were able, by nuclear blackm ail or otherwise, to im ­pose a redistribution of income between the rich and poor nations. Such a global redistribution would make still more

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difficult any significant reduction of class inequality within the affluent nations.8

I do not know o f enough empirical evidence to enable one to judge the relative strength o f the forces in our present society m aking for, and those making against, a move to a more participatory democracy. So m y exploration o f possible forces m aking for it is not to be taken, as a prophecy, but only as a glimpse o f possibilities.

MO D E L S OF P A R T I C I P A T O R Y D E M O C R A C Y

Let me turn finally to the question of how a participatory dem ocracy m ight be run i f we did achieve the prerequisites. H ow participatory could it be, given that at any level beyond the neighbourhood it would have to be an indirect or representative system rather than face-to-face direct demo­cracy ?

(i) Model 4A: an abstract first approximationI f one looks at the question first in general terms, setting

aside for the present both the weight o f tradition and the actual circumstances that might prevail in any country when the pre­requisites had been sufficiently met, the simplest model that could properly be called a participatory dem ocracy would be a pyram idal system w ith direct democracy at the base and dele­gate dem ocracy at every level above that. Thus one would start with direct democracy at the neighbourhood or factory level— actual face-to-face discussion and decision by consensus or majority, and election o f delegates who would make up a council at the next more inclusive level, say a city borough or ward or a township. The delegates would have to be sufficient­ly instructed by and accountable to those who elected them to make decisions at the council level reasonably democratic. So it would go on up to the top level, which would be a national council for matters o f national concern, and local and regional

8 Cf. Robert L. Heilbroner: An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, 2nd edn., New York, 1975, especially ch. 3, where it is argued that, for reasons such as these, the Western nations are unlikely to be able to keep up even their present degree of liberal democracy.

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councils for matters o f less than national concern. A t whatever level beyond the smallest prim ary one the final decisions on different matters were made, the issues would certainly have to be formulated by a committee of the council. Thus at whatever level the reference up stopped, it would stop in effect with a small committee o f that level’s council. This m ay seem a far cry from democratic control. But I think it is the best we can do. W hat is needed, at every stage, to make the system demo­cratic, is that the decision-makers and issue-formulators elected from below be held responsible to those below by being subject to re-election or even recall.

N ow such a system, no matter how clearly responsibilities are set out on paper, even if the paper is a formal national constitution, is no guarantee o f effective democratic participa­tion or control: the Soviet U nion’s ‘democratic centralism’ , w hich was just such a scheme, cannot be said to have provided the dem ocratic control that had been intended. The question is whether such failure is inherent in the nature o f a pyramidal councils system. I think it is not. I suggest that we can identify the sets o f circumstances in which the system won’t work as intended, that is, won’t provide adequate responsibility to those below, won’ t be actively democratic. Three such sets of circumstances are evident.

(1) A pyram idal system will not provide real responsibility o f the government to all the levels below in an imm ediately post-revolutionary situation; at least it w ill not do so if the threat o f counter-revolution, with or without foreign interven­tion, is present. For in that case, democratic control, with all its delays, has to give w ay to central authority. T h at was the lesson o f the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. A further lesson, to be drawn from the subsequent Soviet experience, is that, i f a revolution bites o ff more than it can chew dem ocratically, it will chew it undemocrat- ically.

N ow since we do not seem likely, in the Western liberal democracies, to try to move to full dem ocracy by w ay o f a Bolshevik revolution, this does not appear to be a difficulty for us. But we must notice that the threat o f counter-revolution is present not only after a Bolshevik revolution but also after a

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parliam entary revolution, i.e. a constitutional, electoral, take­over o f power by a party or popular front pledged to a radical reform leading to the replacement o f capitalism. T h at this threat m ay be real, and be fatal to a constitutional revolu­tionary regime which tries to proceed dem ocratically, is evident in the example o f the counter-revolutionary overthrow o f the Allende regime in Chile in 1973, after three years in office. W e have to ask, therefore, whether the Chilean sequence could be repeated in any o f the more advanced Western liberal- democracies. Could it happen in, say, Italy or France? I f it could, the chances o f participatory dem ocracy in any such country would be slim.

There is no certainty that it could not happen there. W e cannot rely on there being a longer habit o f constitutionalism in Western Europe than in Latin Am erica: indeed, in those European liberal democracies which are most likely to be in this situation in the forseeable future (e.g. Italy and France), the tradition o f constitutionalism cannot be said to be much older or firmer than in Chile. W e should, however, notice that A llende’s popular front coalition was in control o f only a part o f the executive power (the presidency, but not the contraloria, which had power to rule on the legality o f any executive action), and was in control o f none o f the legislative (including taxing) power. I f a similar government elsewhere came into office with a stronger base it could proceed dem ocratically without the same risk o f being overthrown by counter­revolution.

(2) Another circumstance in which a responsible pyram idal councils system would not work would be a reappearance o f an underlying class division and opposition. For, as we have seen, such division requires that the political system, in order to hold the society together, be able to perform the function o f con­tinual compromise between class interests, and that function makes it impossible to have clear and strong lines o f responsi­bility from the upper elected levels downwards.

But this also is not as great a problem for us as it might seem. For i f my earlier analysis is right, we shall not have reached the possibility o f installing such a responsible system until we have greatly reduced the present social and economic inequalities.

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It is true that this will be possible only in the measure that the capital/labour relation that prevails in our society has been fundam entally changed, for capitalist relations produce and reproduce opposed classes. No amount o f welfare-state redis­tribution o f income will by itself change that relation. Nor will any amount o f workers’ participation or workers1 control at the shop-floor level or the plant level: that is a promising breakthrough point, but it will not do the whole job. A fully democratic society requires democratic political control over the uses to w hich the amassed capital and the remaining natural resources o f the society are put. It probably does not m atter whether this takes the form o f social ownership o f all capital, or a social control o f it so thorough as to be virtually the same as ownership. But more welfare-state redistribution o f the national income is not enough: no matter how much it m ight reduce class inequalities o f income it would not touch class inequalities o f power.

(3) A third circumstance in which the pyram idal council system would not work is, o f course, i f the people at the base were apathetic. Such a system could not have been reached except by a people who had thrown o ff their political apathy. But might not apathy grow again? There can be no guarantee that it would not. But at least the main factor which I have argued creates and sustains apathy in our present system w ould by hypothesis be absent or at least greatly modified— I mean the class structure which discourages the participation o f those in the lower strata by rendering it relatively ineffective, and which more generally discourages participation by requir­ing such a blurring o f issues that governments cannot be held seriously responsible to the electorate.

T o sum up the discussion so far o f the prospects o f a pyra­m idal councils system as a model o f participatory democracy, we m ay say that in the measure that the prerequisite condi­tions for transition to a participatory system had been achieved in any Western country, the most obvious impediments to a pyram idal councils scheme being genuinely democratic would not be present. A pyram idal system might work. O r other impediments might emerge to prevent it being fully demo­cratic. It is not worth pursuing these, for this simple model is

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too unrealistic. It can be nothing but a first approximation to a workable model, for it was reached by deliberately setting aside what must now be brought back into consideration— the weight o f tradition and the actual circumstances that are likely to prevail in any Western nation at the time when the transi­tion became possible.

T he most im portant factor here is the existence o f political parties. The simple model has no place for them. It envisages a no-party or one-party system. This was appropriate enough when such a model was put forward in the revolutionary cir­cumstances o f mid-seventeenth-century England and early twentieth-century Russia. But it is not appropriate for late twentieth-century Western nations, for it seems unlikely that any o f them w ill move to the threshold o f participatory demo­cracy by w ay o f a one-party revolutionary take-over. It is m uch more likely that any such move will be made under the leadership o f a popular front or a coalition o f social-democratic and socialist parties. Those parties will not wither away, at least not for some years. Unless all o f them but one are put down by force, several will still be around. The real question then is, whether there is some w ay o f combining a pyramidal council structure with a competitive party system.

(ii) Model 4B: a second approximationThe combination o f a pyram idal direct/indirect democratic

m achinery with a continuing party system seems essential. Nothing but a pyram idal system will incorporate any direct dem ocracy into a nation-wide structure o f government, and some significant amount o f direct democracy is required for anything that can be called participatory democracy. A t the same time, competitive political parties must be assumed to be in existence, parties whose claims cannot, consistently with anything that could be called a liberal democracy, be over­ridden.

N ot only is the combination of pyram id and parties prob­ably unavoidable: it m ay be positively desirable. For even in a non-class-divided society there would still be issues around which parties might form, or even might be needed to allow issues to be effectively proposed and debated: issues such as the

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over-all allocation of resources, environmental and urban planning, population and immigration policies, foreign policy, m ilitary policy.9 Now supposing that a competitive party sys­tem were either unavoidable, or actually desirable, in a non- exploitive, non-class-divided society, could it be combined with any kind o f pyram idal direct/indirect dem ocracy?

I think it could. For the main functions which the competi­tive party system has had to perform,, and has performed, in class-divided societies up • to now, i.e. the blurring o f class opposition and the continual arranging o f compromises or apparent compromises between the demands o f opposed classes, would no longer be required. And those are the features o f the competitive party system which have made it up to now incompatible with any effective participatory democracy. W ith that function no longer required, the incompatibility disappears.

There are, in abstract theory, two possibilities o f combining a pyram idal organization with competing parties. One, much the more difficult, and so unlikely as to deserve no attention here, would be to replace the existing Western parliam entary or congressional/presidential structure o f government by a soviet-type structure, (winch is conceivable even with two or more parties). The other, much less difficult, would be to keep the existing structure o f government, and rely on the parties themselves to operate by pyram idal participation. It is true, as I said earlier, that all the many attempts made by democratic reform movements and parties to make their leaders, when they became the government, responsible to the rank-and-file,

9 It is worth noticin g that in Czechoslovakia, in the spring and summer of 1968 just before the overthrow of the reformist Communist Dubcek regime by the military intervention of the U.S.S.R., one of the widely canvassed proposals for enhancing the democratic quality of the political system was the introduction of a competitive party system, and that this had substantial public support and even some support within the ruling Communist Party. In a July public opinion poll 25 per cent of the C.P. members polled, and 58 per cent of non-party persons polled, wanted one or more new parties; in an August poll, in which the question was put ambiguously, the figures were 16 per cent and 35 per cent. (H. Gordon Skilling: Czechoslovakia's Interrupted Revolution, Princeton University Press,

1976, pp. 55° “ ! > 356- 72-)

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have failed. But the reason for those failures would no longer exist in the circumstances we are considering, or at least would not exist to anything like the same degree. The reason for those failures was that strict responsibility o f the party leadership to the membership does not allow the room for manoeuvre and compromise which a government in a class-divided society must have in order to carry out its necessary function of m edia­ting between opposed class interests in the whole society. No doubt, even in a non-class-divided society, there would still have to be some room for compromise. But the amount of room needed for compromise on the sort o f issues that might then divide parties would not be o f the same order o f m agni­tude as the amount now required, and the element o f decep­tion or concealment required to carry on the continual blurring o f class lines would not be present.

It thus appears that there is a real possibility o f genuinely participatory parties, and that they could operate through a parliam entary or congressional structure to provide a substan­tial measure o f participatory democracy. This I think is as far as it is now feasible to go by w ay o f a blueprint.

P A R T I C I P A T O R Y D E M O C R A C Y AS

L I B E R A L D E M O C R A C Y ?

One question rem ains: can this model o f participatory demo­cracy be called a model o f liberal dem ocracy? I think it can. It is clearly not dictatorial or totalitarian. The guarantee o f this is not the existence o f alternative parties, for it is conceivable that after some decades they might wither away, in conditions o f greater plenty and widespread opportunity for citizen parti­cipation other than through political parties. In that case we should have m oved to M odel 4.A. The guarantee is rather in the presumption that no version o f M odel 4 could come into existence or remain in existence without a strong and wide­spread sense o f the value o f that liberal-democratic ethical principle which was the heart o f M odel 2— the equal right o f every man and woman to the full development and use o f his or her capabilities. And o f course the very possibility o f M odel4 requires also, as argued in the second section o f this chapter,

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a downgrading or abandonment o f market assumptions about the nature o f man and society, a departure from the image o f man as m aximizing consumer, and a great reduction o f the present economic and social inequality. Those changes would make possible a restoration, even a realization, o f the central ethical principle o f M odel 2; and they would not, for the reason given earlier,10 logically deny to a M odel 4 the descrip­tion ‘liberal’ . As long as there remained a strong sense o f the high value o f the equal right o f self-development, M odel 4 w ould be in the best tradition o f liberal democracy.

10 A t the end of ch. I, pp. 21-2.

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Further Reading

Those who want to get further into a subject like this, which is both analytical and historical, will generally find it more rewarding to go first to some o f the works o f the leading original writers rather than relying on even the best secondary accounts o f them, especially when, as is sometimes the case, the former are shorter than the latter.

T o appreciate the enormously confident style o f the early nineteenth-century theorists o f liberal democracy one could not do better than to look at James M ill’s famous article ‘Governm ent’ (written first for a supplement to the fifth edition o f the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1820 and reprinted many times, usually as An Essay on Government), or a few pages o f Bentham— either the brief chapters o f his Principles o f the Civil Code cited above in ch. II, nn. 2, 7-12, and 15-18, or the first few chapters o f his Introduction to the Principles o f Morals and Legislation.

The classic statement o f M odel 2A is John Stuart M ills’ Considerations on Representative Government. The most elegant short presentation o f M odel 2B is A. D. Lindsay’s The Essentials of Democracy. There is a useful account o f some further 2B theorists in ch. i o f Dennis F. Thom pson’s The Democratic Citizen , London, Cam bridge University Press, 1970.

The leading expositions o f M odel 3 are the works listed in nn. 1 and 2 o f ch. IV : the best are still Schum peter’s ch. 22 and D ahl’s short Preface to Democratic Theory. T h e leading critiques o f M odel 3 are the works listed in n. 11 o f ch. I V : each o f the three collections o f essays cited there affords an excellent statement o f the case against M odel 3. M y short The Real World o f Democracy, and Essay 10 in m y Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval y put M odel 3 in an unflattering global perspective.

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Further Reading 1 1 7Realistic works on participatory democracy are scarce. Its

advocates incline simply to celebrate direct democracy, often as a w ay towards an ideal anarchistic society (for example in many o f the essays in C, George Benello and Dimitrios Roussopoulos (eds.): The Case for Participatory Democracy: Some Prospects for a Radical Society, New York, Grossman, 1971) But there are useful treatments in Carole Patem an’s Participation and Democratic Theory and in the Nomos volume Participation in Politics cited in n. 3 to ch. V . A n earlier volume, also entitled Partici­pation in Politics, edited by Geraint Parry (Manchester University Press, 1972), has interesting essays on the possibility and desirability o f more participation, on the place o f partici­pation in M arxian theory, and on the record in some Western and Communist and Third W orld countries.

Page 123: C. B. Macpherson-The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy-Oxford University Press(1977)

Index

Abundance, Bentham on, 28-9 Allende, Salvador, 110 Almond, Gabriel A., 78 n. 1 American Society for Political and

Legal Philosophy, 94 n. 3 Angels, 82Apathy, 88-9, 91, 94, 99, 102, 103,

106, 111 Aristotle, 9, 11, 12 n. x Aylmer, G. E., 14 n. 4

Bachrach, Peter, 83 n. 3, 84 n. 11, 85 n. 14

Ball, John, 13 Baratz, Morton S., 83 n. 3 Barg, M. A., 14 n. 4 Barker, Ernest, 48, 69, 71-2 Beer, M., 13 n. 2 Benello, C. George, 117 Bentham, Jeremy, io, 21, 39, 40, 42,

44> 47 > 5°> his bourgeoisassumptions, 33-4; his case for democracy, 34-7; his case for in­equality, 30; his general theory, 24-34, 52> his understanding of capitalism, 49; on abundance, 28-9; on class differentials, 30; on franchise, 34.-7; on security of prop­erty, 30-3; on subsistence, 27-8; on the poor, 28; on women, 35-6; on working class, 37, 42-3, 63

Berelson, Bernard R.} 78 n. i, 82, 85 n. 13, 88 n. 16

Blewett, Neal, 50 n. 6 Bourgeois assumptions: in Bentham,

33-4; in J. S. Mill, 53-6; see also Market assumptions

Braverman, Harry, 104 n. 7 Burke, Edmund, 4, 20

Capitalism: changed condition of,

105-6; contradiction in, 105-6; inconsistent with equal self-develop- ment, 55-6, 62-3, 70; understand­ing of: by Bentham and Jas. Mill, 49; by J. S. Mill, 53-6, 61-2; by later theorists, 49-50

Cartwright, Major John, 24 n, 1 Case, John, 104 n. 7 Central Intelligence Agency, 107 Chapman, J. W., 85 n. 14, 94 n. 3,

103 n. 6 Chartism, 45-6 Chile, 1 zo Ciompi, 13Class: defined, 11; as criterion of

types of society, 11-12; Bentham’s differential in‘sensibility, 30; differ­ential in political participation, 88, 94; recognition of: by Bentham and Jas. Mill, 49; b y j. S. Mill, 49, 56- 7; by later theorists, 49, 70-2; see also Working class

Class assumptions: of anti-democrats, 9-10; of igth-century liberal demo­crats, 10-i 1, 28, 56-8; of 20th- century liberal democrats, 71; of utopian democrats, 10

Class conflict: blurred by party sys­tem, 65-9; effects of possible re- emergence, I!0 -I1

Class differentials: Bentham on, 30;in current participation, 88 n. 2

Class government: avoided, 64; J. S.Mill’s fear of, 56-8

Coates, Ken, 104 n. 7 Cobbett, William, 24 n. 1 Cole, G. D. H., 15 n. 7, 69 Committees, jogCommunity: movements, 93 n. 1,

103; sense of, 98, 99-100 Comte, Auguste, 3 Connolly, William, 84 n. 11

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Index

Consumer sovereignty, 79-81, 84, 86-91

Copernicus, 3Cost/benefit analysis, 102, 105-6 Czechoslovakia, 98, 113 n. 9

Dahl, Robert A., 15 n. 6, 78 n. 1, 81, 85 n. 14, 89 n. 18, 116

Democracy, liberal: see Liberal demo­cracy

Democracy,, pre-liberal; see Pre­liberal democracy

‘Democratic centralism’, 109 Dewey, John, 5, 48, 69, 73-5 Diminishing utility, law of, 29;

Bcntham’s neglect of, 33

Economic growth: costs of, 102, 106;debatable, 97

Edinburgh Review, 41 Einstein, Albert, 3 Electronic direct democracy, 95-8 Elites, role of, 77-8, 90-1, 99 Encyclopedistes, 20 Equality: Bentham5 s case for, 29, 32;

against, 30

Farr and, Max, 15 n. 6 Ferguson, Adam, 3 Four stages, law of, 3 France, 23, n oFranchise: as criterion of democracy,

23: 49~5° ; changes in, 23, 49-50, 63; demand for reform of, 45-6, 63 n. 27; positions on: Bentham,34-7; Jas. Mill, 37- 42; J- S. Mill, 57-60

Garson, G. D., 104 n. 7 Gross National Product, 43, 102

Hamburger, Joseph, 37 n. 29, 40 n. 36 Harrington, James, 12 Harrison, Royden, 63 n. 27 Heilbroner, Robert L., 108 n. 8 Hill, Christopher, 14 n. 4 Hobbes, Thomas, 4 Hobhouse, L. T., 5, 48, 69 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 48 n. 5 Hunnius, Gerry, 104 n. 7

Inequality: Bentham’s case for, 30; possible reduction of, 107-8; reduc­tion of as prerequisite of participa­tory democracy, 100, 106, IIO-II

Incremental change, 101 Invisible hand, 82 Italy, n o

Jacquerie, 13Jefferson, Thomas, 8, 11, 15, 17-19,

20, 24

Kalodner, Howard I., 93 n. 1 Kariel, Henry, 84 n. n Keynes, J. M., 92, 106

Ladd, John, 103 n. 6 Laski, H.J., 69Lazarsfeld, Paul F., 78 n. 1, 82, 85

n. 13, 88 n. 16 Levellers, 14--15Liberal democracy: market assump­

tions in, 1-2, 20-1; possible models of, 8-9, 114-15; two concepts of, 1-2

Liberal democratic theory, declining realism of, 49-50

Liberalism, linked to capitalism by assumption of scarcity, 21-2

Lindsay, A. D., 5, 48, 69, 70, 116 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 88 n. 16 Locke, John, 5, 20

Macaulay, T. B., 40 Machiavelli, N., 3, 11 Maclver, R. M., 48, 69, 72-3, 76 Madison, James, 15 n. 6 Man, images (models) of, 5; equi­

librium theorists’ model, 79, 85-6, 92; J. S. Mill’s model, 47, 48, 51, 60, 61; participatory theory’s re­quired model, 99, 115

Market assumptions, 1-2, 20-1, 76, 77-80, 82, 83, 87-91, 115

Marx, Karl, 3, 4, 11, 98, 100-1, 106 McCoy, Charles A., 83 n. 3, 84 n. r 1 McPhee, William N., 78 n. 1, 82,

85 n. 13, 88 n. 16 Milbrath, Lester W., 88 n. 16 Mill, James, 10, 21, 24-5, 44, 47, 50,

116* his understanding of capital­ism, 49; on franchise, 37-42; on the rich, 42; on working class, 37, 42-3,63

Mill, John Stuart, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4139> 43 > 49 > 5° * 64~ 5 > 69> 72,

100-1,. 106, 116; his acceptance of capitalism, 53-6, 61-2; his ambiguous definition of property, 53; his case for democracy, 51-2; his model of man, 47-8, 51, 60-1; his neglect of women in plural voting, 59; his recognition of class, 56-7; on class government, 56-8; on franchise, 57-60; on participa­tion, 60,62; on plural voting, 57-9;